Customers: How to Get More Shoppers on Your Lot

Are you short of customers, or short of stock?

These look identical from the cash balance and are completely different problems. The test:

• If shoppers arrive and leave without buying → you do not have a customer problem, you have a supply problem. Read how to sell trees instead.
• If the lot sits fully stocked and nobody is walking in → now it is a demand problem, and this page applies.

Players routinely try to “get more customers” while their shelves are empty. That converts into more empty-shelf visits, not more revenue.

What moves customer flow

Three levers appear in the game, and they are not equally controllable:

The honest answer is that demand is the least directly controllable part of this game. That is exactly why the guides here put stock and throughput first: they are the parts you can fix in the next five minutes.

Using Reputation well

Reputation arrives in three shapes, and they are not interchangeable:

• Flat grants (for example 1,000 or 4,000 Reputation from a code) — worth claiming immediately, because the benefit starts as soon as you have it.
• A 2x Reputation window — worth activating only when you are actively selling. A multiplier on a session where nothing is sold multiplies nothing.
• Anything earned through normal play — accumulates passively; no decision required.

One caveat worth stating plainly: the developer does not publish a reputation-to-customer formula. Treat reputation as a soft lever that helps, not a dial you can turn to a specific number.

Why expanding is the last demand lever, not the first

An expansion raises the ceiling on both stock and traffic. That only converts into cash if the current ceiling is what is holding you back. If your lot is half stocked, expanding makes a bigger half-stocked lot — the same percentage of nothing.

The signal that you are ready: every shelf full, every customer served, cash still accumulating between restocks. At that point the constraint is physical space, and expansion is the correct purchase. The upgrade order covers what to buy immediately after.

Getting ready for an event window

Event windows have historically pushed extra customers through the lot, which means the constraint flips from demand to supply for the duration. Preparation, in order:

1. Fill every shelf before the window opens.
2. Hold enough cash for a restock, not for a long-payback upgrade.
3. Claim any live code at the start — free cash during a demand spike is worth more than the same cash afterwards.
4. Do not expand mid-window; it will not pay back before the window closes.

The dated record lives in the event history, including the current run.

Related

• How to earn cash — what to do with the revenue.
• How to sell trees faster — the throughput side.
• Working codes — where the reputation grants come from.
• Upgrade order — expansion timing.