I want to know what kind of shops are profitable to create in the game. What did you try?

During my attempts I found out that running certain shops is highly unprofitable, because the cost of the stuff you're selling is too low. It's the major reason why sites with custom-created stuff for particular shops (like butchery) are useless: they make their custom stuff cost so low that you can't really run such a shop. After hiring a couple of employers they get all the meager money that such a cheap shop generates.

Last days I've been thinking on running a book shop, but I suspect that a book costs so little that no profit would be generated either. This is why I'm wondering what is actually doable, in terms of getting money.

P.S. I understand that running businesses with bandatron is profitable, so I'm only asking about shops and stuff that can be sold in them.

My founder in my new BACC challenge is running an art shop out of his home: he paints various canvas (regular painting, custom painting, still-life, portraits, etc.) and then displays them for sale in the store. I consider it a type of exhibition "tour", so the store opens when he has his own canvas covering most of the wallspace, and closes when his wife heads off to work, because she had to go and have quads , so they need all hands on deck when the boys get home from school.

Since I'm running it A: out of their home and B: without any additional employees, I suspect the profit is close to what it would be if I'd just sold the canvas straight off the easel. Not sure how profitable it would be with employees (and when they save up enough cash for a community lot, I'll add game paintings from Buy Mode and sculptures and things), but if the canvas are all "masterpieces", they'd be selling at 500$+...

The easyest business I ever had was a bar I ran from the home lot with the ticket machine, it never closed, and the owner just played poker all day, you got tons of money this way (but that was boring). The hardest is running a restaurant and having that as your only income. The trick of running it was having the owner do everything, it's doable, but hard. Then when there is too much to do with only one sim, have one of the employees come to work, if you have no family members who can help you. The restaurant was fully staffed, but the only time I called all of them in was on the first day so I can assign duties to them. The point of doing it so is that when you visit the lot using another family, it's a fully functional restaurant. Also when visiting the lot with another family, don't linger too long, so the owner doesn't loose all his money to employee pays.

The same tactic I used for almost all my shops, fully staff it so it's usable when visiting the lot with another family, but when playing the owner, do it all yourself or with minimum help.

I never had a butcher shop, but I did have a shop that sold downloaded cheese, books, cupcakes, chocolate and other fun stuff, they were profitable, but because they were my sim's sole income the sims hardly made tons of money out of them. If you are trying to make it big, then a ticket machine business is your answer, that or selling really expensive things like cars, and real-state.

Yes, the electron machine is vital if you have somewhere people want to hang out, not just buy stuff.

I attempted to do a restaurant at one point, but it seemed too much hard work for very little profit, especially as you have to hire waiters/chefs (unless you use family members). Now I'll just have a restaurant area WITHIN a nightclub just in case I want to do the restaurant side, but most of my clubs just have help-yourself food buffets (eg I use the pizza and food buffets available from Simwardrobe where you can charge for the food).

The most profitable business I have is a nightclub/music venue where the owner has not just a dazzle gold sales badge but has also earned the ability to "manipulate" customers into buying. She has a couple of bartenders, one other person selling, and that's it. She doesn't bother employing someone just to DJ or musicians to perform as I just teleport in custom sims I made just for that purpose and they earn tips. Re how much to charge customers, you have to strike a middle ground between what is considered an "average" price and what you feel your sim can get away with charging - so she charges approx 300-500 per hr per customer, and I have a customer limit adjuster set at about 30 customers. So that nets her about 9,000-15k per hour.

Also it's a good idea to have things to do at a lot that customers will spend a LONG time doing, eg the poker cards table, hot tub, as well as things like the pool table, darts, DJ booth, etc.
The more things there are to keep customers entertained, the more they'll stick around and are prepared to pay high prices. Eg, I have a farm which sells fruit, veg and fish - not terribly profitable in itself - but add a electron machine, plasma TV and a food-making machine to one of the buildings on the lot and then you've got 10 visiting sims sitting around watching telly for ages!

I also have a gym/sports club, and in terms of shops have a car dealership which is pretty successful (especially as the owner also charges just to look around - hehe) a music instruments retailers, and a gadget/electrical shop. I find JUST selling stuff doesn't create the greatest profit (unless what your selling is really expensive), but combine it with charging customers to visit the shop and providing some kind of entertainment or food will net a greater profit.

1) Use items with reasonable catalog costs. You're right: if your inventory consists of cc pieces priced at §5, your Sim will never be able to sell enough to make a living. Setting them at ridiculously expensive doesn't help and actually works against anyone buying anything unless your shop is already popular. So a bookstore is a challenge. I think books sell on average for §37 each? The way around that is to include non-book items with higher prices that would make sense in a book store, like globes and posters and ant farms.

2) Spend your business perks on the wholesale perks first. The deeper the discount when you restock, the more profit your Sim makes.

3) Use the sales interaction, but don't overuse it. If your customers are other playable Sims and you know they're low on funds, avoid harassing them.

4) Try to clear the store of loiterers, especially in the early days. The game code has a hard limit on how many Sims are allowed on your lot at each business level. If a slot is taken up by someone who would rather play kicky bag than shop, you can't make money. (Plus, the kicky bag could block the cash register long enough to frustrate the Sims who are making purchases.)

I once had a chocolate shop, with a choco factory found here at MTS. I think it has been the most profitable business so far! Everyone, and I mean EVERYone came to buy chocolate I had one sim making candies in the back and another selling them and it worked fine. Although I ended up cheating with their motives (of course...) to keep business open all day long. But you know, chocolate can be addictive... B)

Also another succesfull business was a home-bakery. They made most of the items themselves and got good money from it. Whatever they do, where they "generate" items with no cost to themselves (like paintings and food) it'll make quite good amount of money.

Re number 3) you can get a mod from Insiminator which allows your playables to come to the store and buy, however the money won't be deducted from their account nor will the item appear in their inventory, while the owner will still get the cash. I have it in my game but haven't tested it to see if it actually works. It's called "shopnosaveitem".
You can also add a mod called "noplayableshoppers" if you don't want your playables to visit businesses AT ALL. That's one of JM Pescado's mods at MATY. Personally I don't use it though as I prefer my sims to visit my businesses, especially the clubs and social places.

Re number 4), again the Customer Limit Adjuster from Simwardrobe is a godsend in upping the number of customers on a business lot. It works great in my game and is probably one of the best object mods I've ever installed.

PS - Maranatah - I want to do a chocolate shop too! :P

But that's like using a moneycheat, kind of plateau the whole game. Plus it defeats the purpose one of the most fun things about having playable sims as customers, finding out what they have brought.

Ones, before getting a computer that wouldn't make visiting a community lot such a pain, I used to have all my buisensses as home businesses. Once I had a liquor shop that was run by Freddy Kreuger (downloaded from this site, but without the cutom skin).The products were some downloaded wine bottles I found from somewhere, there was no drinking animation to it, but you got drunk. It was really funny seeing who came to buy. Specially when it was the upper class fancy house wife, and the store itself was in the worst part of town.

Well I don't think there's any particular logic to what they buy - in my game they usually buy random stuff they don't need. When I didn't have that mod in my game, I'd go back and find sims buying multiple stereo equipment (when they already had the most expensive one in the catalogue), wedding arches (even if they weren't getting married), and one sim even bought a pet dog - argggh!.

SimWardrobe has a ton of great mods for businesses, including 'customers leave after purchase' and 'playables don't go broke', as well as some really brilliant objects, like a timeclock, customer limit adjuster, packing stations for fruit/veg, etc. http://simwardrobe.com/

Real estate tends to rake in the simoleons, however you do need a bit of money first to purchase a lot so that you can sell it.

Thanx everybody.



How does real estate work? I never tried it. You actually purchase lots and other sims actually buy them? What happens to these lots, are they shown as "owned" lots afterwards, for example, if bought by townies?

To sell real estate, your Sim buys community lots or Bon Voyage vacation lots via computer or phone. Place the deeds on display and then mark them for sale using the price tag tool on the business interface.

If a deed is purchased by a townie, the lot returns to the pool of available lots. If the deed is purchased by a playable Sim, that Sim owns the lot.

If you have BV, I don't recommend that you sell vacation lots to playables this way. If you send the new owner to their vacation home, the game reads the lot as a home business. (Of course, if your vacation home has plenty of entertaining things to do and you put down the ticket machine, your Sim can actually profit off vacation.)

The only problem I found with having my Sim have a real estate office is that it takes a really long time for Sims to purchase the deeds since they're so expensive. Novice sales people not wanted. I dazzle them like 4-5 times in a row. Also, you don't need a cashier because they'll be standing there doing nothing for a very long time and you'll be paying them to do so. Keep your profits to yourself and be the cashier and salesperson. OR get/make a Servo.

Thanx, I'm planning to try to do a real estate business soon!

For now I managed to run Club Dante with Malcolm Landgraab generating 400 simoleons per hour, I wonder where the limit is. Sims buy things for 2000 simoleons in shops, so I guess it's possible to push it to 2000. Although it looks ridiculous, Malcolm Landgraab himself wouldn't pay even 400 just to enter an average nightclub

His Electronics Supercenter also generates about 20000 per day, with full staff, which is nice.

Btw I found an oddity in the game: if you work in your business and then go back home, you have to sleep. But if instead you go to another business, then all your motives magically restore! This way you can play forever without having to go back home to sleep, just go to another business lot once sims are really tired and want to sleep.


Didn't you need one more sim to restock candies? And one more to be a cashier, as opposed to only selling?


Weren't earnings off of food almost the same as purchased groceries? I heard about such a business before, and somebody who was talking about it said that it was unprofitable for the reason of earnings not covering grocery costs.

Ok I have a new question... How do the earnings get estimated by the game when you're phoning it to the manager? I can't believe that Electronics Supercenter that made 30,000 last day, got my sim only 4,620 after phoning in next day... And Club Dante made about 20,000, after phoning in next day my sim got about 2,300. That's a little disappointing.

With choco-shop it was a couple who ran the business, male was in the back making stuff and wife was cashier and salesperson to those who were looking for help. I don't remember did she actually had to sale more than that, as those chocolates were very popular and sims were buying them non-stop. She also restocked, although it was sometimes hard when people were waiting in the line to pay too. But I didn't want to hire anyone else there, as it would have cut their earnings of course.

In the home-bakery, I shamelessly cheated with testingcheats to fill their fridge, so they didn't spend any money for groceries.

I wondered about that too when I first started running businesses and got the owner to check in from home. Maybe it's just a percentage of the last session's earnings you get, but I've never found the answer.

The one thing that annoyed me was that daily takings would depreciate and the owner would eventually have to go back to the business to "shake things up", however there is a mod by JM Pescado (at MATY's site) called "antibusinessdecay" - it's among his Director's Cut mods list - just search the MATY forum for the "Director's cut" thread and choose the list from your latest EP.

A new question. It's about the shops you can open with crafting stations that are buyable. Robots, toys flowers. Has anybody tried it? I am trying right now, but seeing the prices, I suspect it can't be a good business. Maybe I don't understand something. But although you can sell these items for more money than you lose when you start to create them, you will lose out eventually. I got myself 5 gold badge potters + cashier + restocker + seller\manager... They will eat all the difference in prices for sure! This business is heading for disaster.

Besides, I don't think it's possible for potters to work quickly enough in order to produce items for high ranked businesses with many customers on the lot. They only work for about 4 hours before they have hygiene set to zero and need to take a shower. If they take a shower, they can work a bit more, but not much, since they will have low comfort, too. This is ridiculous on its own, and also the speed with which they make items is low. Shelves are going to be empty half of the time!

So am I getting it right that the crafting stations are only meant for home businesses? This way you don't need to hire anybody, just make things at your leisure and sell them later.

Or maybe somebody has been successful in making a normal business, and I just don't understand how it can be done. There are flower and toy shops in Bluewater Village, their existence suggests that it's possible.

I make the inventory at home before I buy the business, and sell other things as well.

I also have snapdragons boosting the motives of the crafters.

But yes, it is hard to make a profit on nothing but craftables on a community business lot.

In my neighborhood, crafting businesses are passed down through the family, so the crafting stations are operated by controllable family members who don't get paid. Since the next generation needs to use the station to build their skills, I start them crafting at home, building whatever items their current badge-state allows. At the (community lot) store, I then switch and have the adults work the stations to produce the gold badge items while the teens work on their register, sales, and restocking skills.

I think servos are the only craftable object requiring excessive building time. I solve that problem by pricing the servos as "ridiculously expensive" so they don't sell frequently, but another solution would be to activate a servo and have it build more servos.

Also, most stores don't require that much staff. I don't hire anybody these days (because when I cycle around to play those Sims in their own lots, "employee" is the least fun career to play) and my married couple has no problems running their toy shop alone. One runs the register while the other does sales/restocking.

If I were going to run a factory-type business and have 4 or 5 crafters making pottery, then I probably wouldn't run it as a retail business. I would have them make amphorae all day and just sell the items directly from the owner's inventory.

With my small-scale farming business, the owner employed one restocker until it seemed necessary to employ someone to also garden while he attended to customers. He checked the computer for potential employees to hire and that woman who runs the Nature hobby lot just happened to be on the list - she has gold gardening and fishing badges. So he snapped her up. At some point I may expand that business with more gardeners. He doesn't earn that much with it currently, but it's at level 10 and got a Best of the Best award. Sometimes quality wins over quantity I guess.

I tend not to let them employ my playable sims as the wage really is pathetic as an "employee" unless you set their wage as "ridiculously overpaid" (and even then it's not that much). For my music club/disco, I downloaded some good-looking or trendy looking adult sims who obviously get put into the game with zero skills and got them hired by the club owner as bartenders, DJ, and one as sales person.

I haven't pursued the pottery/sewing/flower arranging side of things in terms of community-run businesses. Seems too much effort for too little reward. I'd like to do the bakery side of things though as I downloaded some custom food that would be quite nice to sell on.

When you start a crafting business, it's best not to hire restockers and sales people and let the playable sim you have do those positions. Also try to make the crafts at home first. I have a very successful flower shop in my game. One thing that I did early in the business is have my other playable sims give the merchandise back to the owner of the shop (or one of the live in family members). At this point I the owner has a large inventory of flowers, plus she directs employees to make flowers. In fact, she's so well off in her business that when I go to play her business she just goes into the backroom to woohoo with the lead salesperson.

I've also tried art galleries and beauty salons and I'm doing well in both. I will try out a pottery business (once my sim gets to the second level of pottery) and I'll try a food related business (I have a chef who's rich and needs to retire and do something).

LMAO - that's brilliant!
I bet he's one satisfied employee! lol

PS - re the art galleries - I was intending to build one for my game for a long time, not so much a general art gallery but more as a meeting place for all my sims with the art hobby interest (they do all the painting and related woodwork/pottery stuff downstairs - upstairs is devoted to displaying all the portraits of my various sim legacies. I also wanted it to be a lot owned by my original male legacy sim who has the art interest, just to give him something to do now all the kids have left home.)
I was putting off building this for a while as wasn't very inspired - but then last weekend it was rainy outside and I had nothing better to do, so spent several hours on building it and now it's one of my favourite "business" lots.

Next up is the "tinkering" and "games" lot... zzz

I make my business in such a way so that other playable sims would be able to shop there. Is it possible in the way you describe, i.e. all that family will come and do their thing? I always thought that only hired assigned personnel will do the work, the owner will just loiter around, and other family members won't even come...


This is sad... I want a community lot so much, so that my other sims could shop there! But with a non-retail business it makes no sense, because it's easier to do it at home, you won't have to travel to a community lot each day and sit there without doing anything. Too bad carpool doesn't come on comm lots and time doesn't pass, otherwise it would be a good idea.

That's right but there is a mod by Squinge (InSim) to hire family members.


Don't know about the carpool but with the Community Time Project (Crammyboy/MATY) time will pass. I have only problems with the vacation timer and have to remove the mod if I send sims on vacation.