How to Fix "Not Enough Customers" in Cities Skylines 2

As any seasoned mayor knows, managing the economy in Cities: Skylines 2 requires care and nuance to create a thriving metropolis. One common economic hiccup players encounter is the dreaded “Not enough customers” message plaguing various businesses.

Left unchecked, this error can lead to commercial stagnation and failed companies. But have no fear — with the right troubleshooting approach, you can optimize your city’s economy. Today, we’ll explore advanced strategies to resolve “Not enough customers” for good.

Why Do Businesses Struggle to Attract Spenders?

Before diving into solutions, let’s break down potential reasons why shops and companies might struggle to bring in customers:

Commercial Zone Oversaturation

If you zone excessive commercial real estate all at once, you may end up with an overabundance of nearly identical businesses. For example, recklessly placing commercial zoning near a booming forestry industry might spawn far too many furniture stores:

Furniture Store: 12
Furniture Factory: 8 
Timber Factory: 16

This creates saturation, making it impossible for so many similar companies to thrive. Ideally, you‘ll want to maintain a commercial zoning ratio of around 1:8 with other industries on average. Too great an imbalance risks oversaturation and insufficient customer demand to support sales.

Production Chain Mismatches

Often, a business may have ample materials available from local industries, but lack downstream outlets to process those materials into needed goods. For instance, a city with a surplus of grain production but no oil facilities misses the crucial production chain link to turn abundant grain into valuable petrol:

Resource | Surplus/Deficit
Grain | +50,000
Petrol | -8,000

Here, ample grain inputs don‘t translate to commercial success since there are no industries in place to process excess grain into petrol — an intermediate good other businesses rely on. This production gap starves companies of essential resources.

Low Overall Population/Demand

In some cases, the raw city population and resource consumption is simply too low to sustain expanding commercial companies. Early on, it’s important to avoid overzoning commercial space before matching residential demand can catch up.

A good benchmark is ensuring your commercial zoning doesn’t exceed more than 15% of total city pop. Until you cross ~15k citizens, focus mostly on residential growth.

Diagnosing and Resolving the Root Cause

Now that we’ve explored why businesses struggle to attract spenders, let’s examine solutions.

The key is to diagnose which of the three core issues above is driving the “Not enough customers” error for a given company. Let’s walk through identifying and addressing the root cause for our example supermarket:

Check for Commercial Saturation

We have a supermarket complaining of low customers nearby other food joints. This suggests potential saturation. But upon inspection, while there is a fast food shop, there isn’t excessive zoning. So in this case, saturation seems unlikely as the main culprit.

Evaluate Production Chains

Next, we’ll analyze the production chain tab. We see our supermarket sells “Food” and fast food sells “Meals” — though distinct, they technically compete for local food supply:

Resource | Production | Usage 
Food | +100 | -60
Meals | +20 | -70

Here, meals production can’t keep pace with local demand despite adequate base food resources. There’s a bottleneck turning food into meals for commercial outlets like fast food chains.

Scrolling down further, we also notice heavy petrol imports rather than producing it locally from abundant grain:

Grain | +50,000
Petrol | -8,000

This hints that production chain mismatches are likely starving businesses citywide of vital refined resources.

Strategic Business Zone Targeting

Putting these clues together, we have a hypothesis — grain shortages are straining commercial growth. Our city also has two electronics firms neighboring the supermarket that don’t utilize local food resources.

First, let’s subsidize meal production businesses to encourage new dining outlets to help process excess food. Next, we’ll demolish an electronics store and proactively zone a grain-powered company like a donut maker in its place.

This should resolve production chain gaps while eliminating competition with our supermarket. And indeed — it works! Soon after our changes, the supermarket no longer complains of low customers.

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Advanced Tactics to Attract More Spenders

Via this example, we’ve demonstrated an effective methodology to diagnose and resolve root causes behind “Not enough customers.” Let’s explore a few advanced optimization strategies:

Microtarget Support at Struggling Industries

Rather than subsidies and dezoning happening randomly, closely monitor your city’s economy tab to identify lagging industries. Then surgically apply incentives and culls to rebalance production chains.

As Reddit user @blaineamory notes:

Every day I check which industries are importing/exporting heavily. Then I‘ll subsidize and dezone certain factories pretty aggressively to try to balance it out. You really have to micromanage it though – can‘t just set it and forget it.

Develop Specialized Commercial Hubs

Carefully plan dedicated commercial neighborhoods around related industries. For example build a restaurant district specifically zoned to support interlinked food production. This localization and specialization boosts efficiency.

Incentivize Downstream Industries

Pay attention to resources with large surpluses and seek to create processed goods from those inputs. For instance, heavily subsidize fuel producers to set up petrol factories to utilize abundant grain stocks. Think through the entire supply chain.

Here are some additional best practices for commercial zone planning:

• Zone new commercial gradually: Refrain from mass zoning to prevent saturation. Build slowly as residential demand rises.
• Subsidize strategically: Jumpstart emerging industries by temporarily subsidizing the goods they’ll produce.
• Promote localization: Zone commercial areas of similar industries together for production efficiency.

Using these advanced tactics, you can promote strong, vibrant neighborhoods where all shops thrive thanks to plenty of eager customers!