Is it possible to know how long your orders will be in “transit” for? I’ve ordered mine aand it’s been shipped while ago although it feels like it is taking ages. Thank you.
Shipping times are based on location of vendor and seller. Minimum shipping time is 5 game days. If you look at you reports (accessible from the phone) you will find the Vendors Report, this report will show the shipping date as well as the average number of game days shipping will take.
It would be nice to add the possibility to know the estimate delivery time
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This can currently be derived through the Vendor Report. We believe we will also be adding it to the PO table on your Manufacturers.
It’s silly to have to derive / estimate a delivery date. There’s room on the table of inwards goods and not unreasonable that you would get an ETA when you purchase product.
Also - for retail startups (like me) there should be some way to get instant inventory for you first stock or even start with a few units of stock. You could lose players that just quit coz there’s nothing to do for the first day of RT…
Yes, shipping times will be added to more screens. The Vendor Report is a temporary workaround.
Yes, we are thinking about inventory issue and it would be good to figure something out, but it’s complicated because we have to consider implications on the accounting system and a bunch of other data that tracks products and where they come from as we don’t want to imbalance things.
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I just know that is more the time that I am waiting for the product than the time spent selling as a retailer. Right know i have 50.000 cash because i run out of of stock even though i order product when my inventory was still plenty. I am low of money cause i had to order 70 pieces just to be sure to not run out immediately but that feels very inatural and not gradual like a start up should be.
One option would be having a system company that a new player could buy from up to a max of say 100 units or G amount. It would sell at reasonably cheap prices and always ship instantly. Once the 100 units was shipped, that supplier would no longer be visible to the player… Solves the problem of early delays and makes early profit easy, encouraging players to keep playing.
Also - not quite sure why a manufacturer has to be online to ship goods to a retailer. Surely once put on a market you could deem it as being in a central market and deem the buying company as arranging the inwards transport - thus removing a bottleneck from the game.
Regarding SHIPPING TIME for FIRST ORDER, the way we are exploring doing it is making the FIRST ORDER by a NEW RETAIL business have 0 shipping time. It won’t matter where it is ordered from, so this allows the game to work normally (without having to know about or find a special manufacturer). It also avoids the accounting complexity of giving free inventory to a new retailer.
Regarding SHIPPING from the OPEN MARKET, the idea of NOT requiring the MFG business to trigger the shipment is interesting for us to think about. Initially, our thinking has been that we want players to have to do the things real businesses have to do so that we can keep the gameplay authentic (ie, we don’t want to automate too much of the gameplay). But, your idea of allowing products on the OPEN MARKET to ship automatically could work because when a MFG puts products on the OPEN MARKET, those products get set aside (reserved) so technically they are already sitting there waiting to go and cannot be intermingled with other inventory being manufactured and potentially promised to other players in a DIRECT SALE.
But, if we were to trigger AUTO SHIPPING on OPEN MARKET, I think we would also have to significantly INCREASE the LISTING fee for selling and buying on the OPEN MARKET, so that players would still be compelled to use DIRECT SALE more often. In other words, OPEN MARKET would be convenient and fast, but cost a lot more.
Thanks for helping us think this through!
Yeap this is difficult area. I currently have something like a 100 cars on order, not shipped. I am waiting for the other players to log on, maybe they are away for the weekend, maybe they are busy, or given up. I don’t really want to order more cars, if everybody then logs on Monday morning when they are at work 
I’d then have a lot more inventory than required. So right now I’m stuck, waiting for them.
I think you need some kind of planning tool, something where I can look at the expected delivery dates and know when I need to order then and try to schedule the delivery dates. The manufacturer would then need something similar where he/she can plan and schedule production, this is then something more akin to real world business. You may even get to the point where companies are buying / selling and scheduling to a few regular customers and having to plan a long way in advance, which again is what real business do, the relationship between businesses become symbiotic.
Cheers
P
Sorry to bang on about this, but I think this maybe a major hiccup.
In the real world, if a supplier lets you down then you can call them up, talk them, shout at them whatever. This may not mean that ultimately they deliver the goods, they may still fail, but at least you have feedback. You know you spoke to them, you know they are a few days or weeks late etc. or you know you need to look elsewhere.
However, in this game you cannot get that feedback, you never know if the player you are buying from is busy or given up, hasn’t been online for 3 days but is about to logon in the next 3 minutes. You cannot cancel that order for 3 days RT - that is an age in this game.
There a couple ways round this - give the option to cancel earlier.
Or create wholesale companies, perhaps these companies (computer or human controlled but if human controlled they will run into the same issue) buy from the open market and sell to the open market, they hold the stock. When an order comes in they ship immediately. If they were computer controlled they could set their buy and sell prices according to current supply and demand.
Cheers
P
YES, we definitely will need some better planning tools as we go. Right now, you may find the VENDOR and CUSTOMER reports helpful in providing some info the interface does not show.
REGARDING PLAYER FEEDBACK, you raise one of things we hope will come from playing this game and that is players taking their one-on-one communications to another level. We have a LIVE 3D MEETING space to help with that now and our hope is that some players will also want to have live discussions using out-of-game communications, like Skype, Facetime, or even actual face-to-face meetings. For example, when raising money a player could actually pitch another player (Investment Bank) just like a real entrepreneur pitches a real investor in the real world.
FOR NOW … you can view company websites to see the activity log of any player. This can tell you if they have been active in the game but ignoring your requests. You can also post notes about your experience doing business with that company/player so that players build (or kill) their reputations this way. Accessing the company websites is a bit clumsy right now, but it does work (and we will fix the clumsiness in the coming days).
Early on (pre-beta) we did have some NPCs (nonplayable characters) that would participate in the game to help onboard new players and provide some stability, but we never perfected them so they have been disabled so far. We do need to provide some cancellation options, as you suggest and we will definitely do that.
But, note that, we actually want you as a player to feel frustrated at times about other businesses/players not responding to your communications in a timely manner. Coincidentally, I pledged to some crowdfunded board games months ago and every one of them has messaged its backers about problems with their distributors … all of them explaining how they can’t get responses from them, etc. We want this authentic real-world experience to be in our game, so that players learn the importance of doing some research on other companies before they do business with them.
We see a number of people spending a lot of time in the game already, which is AWESOME, but the game is actually designed to be “slow” so that it becomes an augmented reality part of your life … not a game that you play for a few days or weeks and “complete” to move on to the next game, but a game that is always there for you helping you learn more and more about business and money and human behavior, etc., but not taking up too much of your time.
i think speed of game is ok.
Start is quite slow cause you only have 1 business at beginning and cause if you are a retail you need to wait to receive first products to really start to play.
But after the start phase, speed is correct. If you start new retails, manufactures, you will have more things to do too. Moreover regarding retails, that’s a good way to think about delivery time impact on your business. Even if cost are low, buying far away can slow down a lot your growth…
Personnaly i now have lot of things to do and i try to optimize things to not play too much. I am now thinking about expansion’s impact on my game time to keep time to work in real life 
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