So when you sell a product in one of your stores, the same products sold in an AI's store is set to a Price Agreement.
Not sure if that really happens in the real world, but gameplay wise i can understand it. As producer and retailer of that product you do not want to go into a price war with a competitor which will hurt your profits.
Selling a produced product in an E-shop should be different though. Prices in E-shops ingame are almost always lower then in retail stores. Not really sure why or how (missing product branding in E-commerce buildings i guess?)
Thing is, because you have to sell at a lower price in E-shops, through the Price Agreement mechanic, retail store prices are also lowered then what they could be (because Branding is included in the attractiveness).
It also is not logical to have the same selling price all across the world, different wages, different in/deflations, so nominal prices differ per city. Take into account transportation costs, profit margings are much much lower.
As said untill now i didn't give it much thought because trough different playthrough's i hardly ever sold my produced stuff to AI, only my own stores.
But in my current playthrough I'm at a dilema. I'm RP'ing as a big manufacturer and wholesaler, selling my products to AI who sell it in their shops.
For some products there is more market cap to gain and if factories are over producing i would like to sell those products in my E-shop (much like a lot of manufacturers do in real life these days).
But that should NOT put a price agreement rule on the whole planet (in-game). It hurts my profits because most the AI hardly make any profits or even losing (because of transporting costs) money and stop selling my products in their shops.
An example below. In screen1 you can see i hardly sell any Vacuum cleaners in my E-shop. AI is selling it with the same 30% markup, my factory is overproducing and there is alot of market cap to gain, seen in Screen 2.
But as seen in Screen 3, one of my customers shop already stopped buying from my factory because with the transport costs, the shop had to sell at a loss due to the Price Agreement.
Screen1
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- Capture4.PNG (895.83 KiB) Viewed 725 times
- Capture5.PNG (145.28 KiB) Viewed 725 times