E-Commerce

To sell your products through e-commerce, first set up an Internet company specializing in E-Commerce.

Enabling e-commerce sales

A new E-Commerce bar appears below your factories and other wholesale firms — farms and warehouses.

Tick the checkbox on that bar to enable e-commerce sales for the firm. Every e-commerce Internet company you own then adds all of that firm’s consumer products to its catalog automatically, and the interface for setting e-commerce prices appears — the area marked in red above.

Selling your software products through e-commerce

Software can also be sold as a digital download through your e-commerce firm, which saves the trouble of producing packaged box versions.

E-commerce takes time to gain widespread acceptance, so it is worth selling your software through both digital download and retail distribution.

Once E-Commerce Sales is enabled, every consumer product in the firm is linked to your e-commerce firm automatically.

To see a summary of what is being sold, click the E-Commerce button to open the E-Commerce page.

Freight

On an e-commerce sale the product ships directly from the factory or warehouse to the customer, and the customer pays the freight. Freight therefore never appears as an expenditure on your firms’ income statements.

It still matters, though. A product whose freight cost is high relative to its selling price sells poorly through e-commerce, because the customer is the one paying it:

Viewing e-commerce sales in the Product Detail report

With the Digital Age DLC enabled, the [E-Commerce] button switches the list to show the products sold through e-commerce.