Big Ambitions: importing and delivery

Buying from a wholesaler is easy but expensive. Importing brings the unit price down and lets you secure far more at once. In exchange you need a warehouse, a delivery driver, a vehicle, a purchase agent and a logistics manager — all of them — before one cycle completes. Miss any one and the goods never reach your store.

Work through it in order, and skip the steps you already have.

Import or produce?

Start by checking whether the finished good can be imported at all, in the purchase price list. If it can, you can automate quickly without a factory; a factory has to be compared with machines, workers, materials and extra warehouse rent all included. A community post from November 2025 reports that after a patch every sellable good could be imported, but for the current 1.0 state of any given item, trust the saved data and the game screen first.

Site choice — a warehouse is not a customer-facing store, so foot traffic does not feed revenue here. Compare rent, floor area, vehicle bays and how easily you can drive trucks in and out instead. Whether delivery distance affects driver wages or fuel cost is currently unverified.

1. Warehouse and pallet shelves

There are two sizes.

A large warehouse is not just more space — it has two vehicle bays, so it holds two delivery vehicles and can serve that many more stores from one building. Early on, though, rent, deposit and electrical work all scale up with it, so starting small is the safer call.

You do not need to look at the traffic index for a warehouse, because no customers come to it. They sit one block up from the piers in the Garment District and Murray Hill. Turn on the warehouse filter in the Voogle map and they are easy to find.

You have to buy pallet shelves

This is where most people go wrong. Ordinary shelves do not work in a warehouse. It has to be a pallet shelf.

• Pallet shelf — 60 boxes
• Ordinary shelf — 16 boxes (useless in a warehouse)

They are sold at AJ Pederson & Son 13 5th Avenue. At $2,500 each they are a strain early on, so one or two is enough to start.

2. Drivers and vehicles

Each vehicle bay needs one driver. A small warehouse needs 1; a large one needs 2 if you intend to use both bays.

The vehicle choice matters because the number of stores a vehicle can deliver to depends on the model.

The early recommendation is the Mersaidi Dash — generous destination count for the price. The Freight Truck performs best but demands 95% driver skill, so early on you cannot even assign anyone to it.

You buy from General US Trucks (which carries the Mersaidi Dash and the Freight Truck), City Cars and Manhattan Luxury Cars. Full specs for every model are in the vehicle list.

Registering a vehicle to the warehouse

Buying it is not enough. Drive it into the warehouse's vehicle bay and get out, and an assignment message appears in the top right. Then open BizMan → the warehouse → the Drivers tab and drag a driver onto the vehicle slot.

Drivers are hired at Anderson Recruitment 16 5th Avenue. With a headhunter at your headquarters you can also pick candidates straight from the list in the MyEmployees app.

3. Purchase agent

This one works in a headquarters office. If you have no headquarters, rent an office and start a new business with the type set to Headquarters.

Foot traffic is meaningless for a headquarters too. Use a cheap building with a low index, and save the high-index buildings for the office businesses that actually take customers.

A purchase agent needs a workstation made of a desk, a chair and a computer — the same way a cashier needs a register and a cleaner needs a cleaning station. A few employees ask for a specific desk or chair, but usually anything will do. Build a second workstation for the logistics manager while you are at it.

Hire at City Workforce INC 41 4th Avenue — not the ordinary recruitment agency. The higher their skill, the more they knock off the import price.

4. Logistics manager

Hired at the same City Workforce INC as the purchase agent. This employee's skill raises the number of destinations a vehicle can serve.

There is a range where training the logistics manager is cheaper than buying another vehicle. Put an HR manager alongside them and the training runs.

5. Setting up an import contract

The city has seven importers and they carry different things. Which one sells what is in the purchase price list, and you can also right-click a building to preview its stock.

Once you have picked one you must go there in person and talk to the manager at the desk. After that they are in your phone book and you can contract by phone. During that conversation you name the purchase agent who will handle the contract.

One purchase agent handles the contract for one company only. Dealing with all seven means seven purchase agents.

What to know on the order screen

• Smart Delivery — set a target stock level and only the shortfall is ordered. Target 1,000 with 500 in the warehouse brings 500.
• Repeating order — repeats the same order every 7 days.
• Urgent order — for when you cannot wait for the 7-day cycle; it arrives the next day, at a 100% surcharge.
• The quantity is in units, not boxes. If you need 1,000 paper bags, enter 1000, not 1.
• Within one contract you can send each item to a different warehouse.
• When you are done setting it up, you must press the Order button or nothing is ordered.

Warning marks next to an item

• Triangle — that item is in short supply. The purchase price rises sharply.
• Circle — a global backorder. Nothing is delivered at all until the period ends, usually 14 days.

There is no answer to the circle except stocking up in advance. Keep a buffer of your core items.

If the order never arrived

Delivery is decided at 2 a.m. It is judged on the state at that moment, not when you pressed Order, and if any one of these applies the order is cancelled in full, with no partial delivery:

• you do not have cash equal to the order total at 2 a.m.
• the order is below the company's minimum order value
• the warehouse is short of pallet shelf space

6. Setting up delivery routes

With goods sitting in the warehouse, the last step is a route that carries them to your stores. Click the logistics manager at your headquarters and pick the warehouse from the Unassigned dropdown. It is one logistics manager per warehouse.

If no vehicle and driver are assigned to the slots, delivery is impossible. Then use Add New Destination to add stores.

The key field on the destination screen is minimum stock. Set pizza to 500 and when the store is down to 100 the driver tops it up by 400. Get that number right and the store never runs out.

If a product you want is missing from the item list, it is because the store has no furniture or appliance that sells it. Place the display fixture first and it appears.

If a delivery never reached the store

• Is the item actually in the warehouse? — nothing can be carried if it is not there.
• Is there enough shelf space in the store? — 1,000 premium flowers is 40 boxes (25 per box). One 16-box shelf cannot take them.

Get this far and the chain from importer to warehouse to store is complete.