Big Ambitions Suppliers and Importers Guide

Supply is the system that separates people who own three shops from people who own thirty. There are two tiers of it, and most players get stuck because they try to skip the first.

Tier 1: Wholesalers

Wholesalers are walk-in supply — you buy stock directly and it is available immediately. This is how your first store runs, and it is fine for one or two shops with a short item list. It stops scaling the moment you are making the same trip every few days.

Which wholesaler carries which goods is the practical question, and it is the single most-searched supply question about this game — “which wholesale dealer has clothing items” comes up constantly because clothing is split by quality, style and target customer, and no single dealer covers the whole matrix. The wholesale stores are visible in VoogleMaps like any other location; check what each carries before you commit to a product line for your store.

Tier 2: Importers

Importers are the high-volume tier and they are what a warehouse or factory is for. Setting one up is a five-step chain and every step is a hard requirement:

1. Hire a Purchasing Agent — they come from City Workforce Inc.
2. Install a Computer Workstation in your headquarters.
3. Assign the agent to that workstation and to the headquarters schedule.
4. Rent and activate a warehouse or factory to receive the goods.
5. Visit the importer location in person to set up a contract linking it to your purchasing agent.

The constraint people trip over: each purchasing agent manages one importer location at a time. Want to import from two importers? Hire two agents and give them two workstations.

Which Importer Carries What

The import locations sit along the pier and they specialise:

Other import companies documented in the game include JetCargo Imports, SeaSide Internationals, BlueStone Imports and United Ocean Import, which is why “which importer has gifts” does not have a single answer — availability is tracked per company per product.

Weekly Delivery Limits

This is the mechanic that quietly caps your growth:

• Every importer location holds a weekly delivery limit for each item.
• Limits reset Mondays at 08:00.
• Urgent orders count toward the same limit — they are not a bypass.
• Limits are tracked per importer location, and all purchasing agent contracts with the same importer share one limit. Hiring a second agent for the same importer buys you nothing.

The workaround is the obvious one once you know the rule: spread critical products across different importer companies.

Shortages and Backorders

Supply problems are modelled explicitly, and they cut both ways:

Both statuses temporarily raise customer demand for the affected item. That is the part worth exploiting: holding stock through a shortage means selling into elevated demand while your competitors cannot restock. Since both are tracked per vendor, the defence and the offence are the same move — keep a second source for anything you cannot afford to run out of.

One-Time Versus Repeating Orders

• A one-time delivery imports the quantity you requested, once.
• A repeating delivery treats your number as a target stock level. Set 500 with 200 already in the warehouse and the importer sends 300. It tops you up rather than stacking up.

Two conditions apply to both: every importer has a minimum purchase value below which it simply will not deliver, and the receiving facility needs pallet shelves to physically hold the goods. Deliveries arrive at midnight on the delivery day.

The Import Price Index

MarketInsider shows an import price index per product alongside demand, the lowest market price on the street and how many businesses already provide that item. It is the number that tells you whether importing is currently cheap or expensive relative to normal.

1.0 changed how you affect it: exporting goods now moves the index. Over-export an item and its import/export price drops for the rest of that week. If you are running a factory that produces more than your stores consume, dumping the surplus is no longer free money — you are moving the market against yourself. See what 1.0 changed.

Two 1.0 Quality-of-Life Fixes Worth Knowing

• Import orders are no longer cancelled if your purchasing agent is off sick. Before 1.0 this silently broke supply chains.
• The importer UI now shows box size when ordering, so you can work out how much pallet space an order actually needs before you place it.

Where This Leads

Once imports are running, the next step is usually to stop importing finished goods and start importing raw materials instead — which is the factory guide. The warehouse side of the operation, including delivery drivers and why stock sometimes never arrives at a store, is in warehouse and deliveries.