Big Ambitions Products: Every Supply Chain Link in 1.0

Updated 2026-09-08 · Last verified 2026-09-08 · Steam Big Ambitions

Big Ambitions has no single "products" screen: goods reach a shop through one of two supply routes, and which route you can use is decided by the business type, not by you. Wholesalers cover low volume and can sell to you in person; importers cover high volume, sit on the piers, and refuse to deliver anywhere except a warehouse or factory.

This page maps the whole chain, flags the three places where the circulating documentation contradicts itself, and explains why there is no price table on it.

The two supply routes

Every sellable good enters your empire through a wholesaler or an importer. The distinction is not cosmetic: it determines whether you need a warehouse at all.

	Wholesaler	Importer
Role	Low volume, early game	High volume, requires a warehouse or factory
Staff needed	None	Purchasing Agent, at a Headquarters workstation
Can deliver to a shop	Yes, by contract	No
Self-collection in person	Yes, and it does not count against the weekly limit	No
Receiving furniture	Storage Shelf	Pallet Shelf
Rush order surcharge	20%	100%
Weekly limit counted per	Each shop you deliver to	The importer location, shared by all contracts with it

Source note: one source, the community wiki's Wholesalers and Importers pages, last edited 19 October 2025 and therefore Early Access material. Four separate lines in the official 1.0 changelog confirm the framework rather than the numbers: the Importers UI now shows box size when ordering, import orders survive a sick Purchasing Agent, the weekly order limit for popcorn was raised, and Logistics Manager and Purchasing Agent delivery lists can be reordered. Weekly limits, box ordering and both staff roles all still exist in 1.0. The percentages above have no 1.0 confirmation.

Both sources share one failure mode. Order too heavily from one vendor and that item goes on Shortage for two weeks: the price rises but you can still buy. Trigger a second shortage while the first is running and it becomes a Backorder for one week, during which the item cannot be bought at all. Both states temporarily raise customer demand for the affected item, which is the reason to spread orders across several vendors rather than one. Early Access sourcing, single page, no 1.0 confirmation either way.

Which businesses need which route

Business type	Supply route	Confidence
Gym	None required to open. Since EA 0.11 it can also sell Soda and Energy Drink, with no extra employee	Official EA 0.11 notes plus community wiki
Fast Food Restaurant	Wholesaler or importer	Community wiki, Early Access
Coffee Shop	Wholesaler or importer	Community wiki, named in the official store description
Fruit and Vegetable Store	Wholesaler or importer	Community wiki, Early Access
Supermarket	Wholesaler or importer	Community wiki, named officially
Florist	Wholesaler or importer	Community wiki, named officially
Hairdresser	Wholesaler or importer	Community wiki, Early Access
Gift Shop	Wholesaler or importer	Community wiki, named officially
Book Store	Importer only, so a warehouse is mandatory	Community wiki, Early Access
Liquor Store	Importer only	Community wiki, named officially
Nightclub	Importer only	Community wiki, named officially
Jewelry Store	Importer only	Community wiki, Early Access
Electronics Store	Importer only	Community wiki, Early Access
Clothing Store	Importer only	Community wiki, named officially
Cinema and Theater	Sell Popcorn, Cotton Candy, Slushies and a Cheese Platter. Supply route not documented anywhere we can verify	Products confirmed by the official EA 0.10 notes

Office businesses sell no goods at all. Law Firms, Web Development Agencies, Graphic Designers and, since EA 0.11, Travel Agencies and Event Planning Agencies handle customers digitally from workstations, so they have no supply chain to build. Full list on the businesses page.

The importer-only column is the practical trap: six retail types cannot be stocked without first renting a warehouse and hiring both a Purchasing Agent and a Logistics Manager, a far larger opening commitment than a shop on a wholesaler contract.

Product categories

The community wiki's Warehouse page, last edited 5 September 2026 and therefore 1.0 era, groups importable goods into these categories. Its own note is worth quoting: "Many products can only be ordered from one importer." Single source, no independent corroboration.

Category group	Categories listed
Drinks	Soda, Energy drink, Alcoholic drinks, Raw materials for drinks
Food	Food for fruit and vegetable stores and supermarkets, Food for fast food restaurants, Food for cinemas, Baked goods / ice cream / tea / coffee, Cheese platter, Raw food for factory
Retail goods	Clothes (cheap), Flowers, Hair care product, Books, Umbrella, Electronics, Gifts, Jewellery (cheap), Tobacco products
Consumables and inputs	Paper bag, Non-food raw materials for factory

Within a shop, goods are not equal. Each retail type has primary and secondary products: primary carries the largest share of revenue, secondary supplements it, and anything outside both lists sells worst there. The documented example is expensive flowers, best in a Florist, second best in a Gift Shop, worst everywhere else. Single Early Access source, last edited 25 November 2024, and a mechanism rather than a number, which is why it is safe to repeat.

Goods added by patch

Product	Added in	Where it sells	Source
Popcorn, Cotton Candy, Slushies, Cheese Platter	EA 0.10, 11 March 2026	Cinemas and theatres	Official changelog
Cup of Tea	EA 0.10	Coffee shops, from the same Industrial Coffee Machine as coffee	Official changelog
Energy Drink	EA 0.11, 18 June 2026	Supermarkets, liquor stores, nightclubs, gift shops, gyms	Official changelog

Version 1.0 added no new sellable goods that the official changelog names. It did raise the weekly order limit for popcorn, which is the only per-item supply figure 1.0 touches by name and it gives no number.

One older claim is now wrong. Write-ups describing the gym as a business with no inventory at all predate EA 0.11, where the official notes state gyms sell Soda and Energy Drinks "and don't even require an extra employee to do so". That is a mechanism fact; this page still does not tell you which business is best to start.

Getting stock from a warehouse into a shop

Three conditions have to be true at once, and this is the part two community pages agree on:

A delivery vehicle is parked inside the warehouse or factory.
A Delivery Driver is assigned to that vehicle's slot.
The receiving shop has at least one Storage Shelf with free space.

A Logistics Manager, seated at a Headquarters workstation, then builds the delivery plan. Deliveries run Smart, meaning the number you type is a target stock level rather than an order quantity: ask for 500, and a shop holding 200 receives 300, counting everything already on its display and storage shelves. Warehouse to warehouse and warehouse to factory transfers work the same way by setting the destination in the plan.

Two 1.0 changes affect how that stock behaves once it lands. Inventory is now distributed more evenly across devices, with the official example being two empty cash registers and one box of paper bags, where the first register takes only half the available stock rather than all of it. And Storage Shelves can now be placed in warehouses and factories, not just shops. Both are first-party 1.0 notes.

The conflicts we are not resolving

Three of them, all inside the same community wiki, which is why they cannot be treated as multiple sources disagreeing.

Question	Claim A	Claim B	Status
Can a factory deliver to a shop?	Buildings page (edited 7 September 2026): "Only warehouses can deliver goods to shops"	Importers page (edited 19 October 2025): a Logistics Manager distributes "from your warehouse or factory to your retail stores"	Open
How many importers?	Importers page names seven	Warehouse page has an eighth column, Global Harvest	Open
Delivery destinations per warehouse	Delivery Driver and Logistics Manager pages give one figure per vehicle, doubling at full manager skill	Importers page caps every vehicle at the same low number; Warehouse page gives a whole-warehouse total	Open, no number reproduced here

On the factory question, Buildings is the fresher page, and the Warehouse page's event table lists factory to warehouse to shop as a distinct multi-step route, which reads as agreeing with it. Suggestive, not decisive, and the Importers page has never been corrected. Anyone stating confidently which is true in 1.0 is guessing.

On the importer count, the official EA 0.10 notes describe the dock as Piers 1 to 4 for product importers, Pier 5 as the party pier, and Piers 6 to 9 for raw goods importers, with Pier 9 opening in that update. Eight importer piers is consistent with an eighth company existing, but the changelog names no companies, so it corroborates the shape and not the count.

The delivery timing is a fourth disagreement. One page says shipments leave at 02:00, another says 08:00. There is a mechanism direction that all sources share, bigger vehicle plus higher Logistics Manager skill equals more destinations, and there is no number worth writing. Detail on logistics.

Pricing: the mechanism, not a table

There is no per-item price table on this page and there will not be one. Biggerambitions.com has been recording buy and sell prices since 2023 and has updated its tables for 1.0, including all seven neighbourhoods. A copy here would be a second-hand snapshot that stops matching the game the next time the economy is patched, and the economy moves: EA 0.11 raised profitability for gyms and four office types, and 1.0 rebuilt banking and tax outright.

What can be documented is how pricing works.

Prices are set per shop, per item, against the local market. The MarketInsider app reports each neighbourhood's population, demand and minimum market price, and 1.0 fixed a bug where items were not sorted by their localised value in that app, which confirms the app is live in 1.0.
The HQ Pricing Manager is new in 1.0. Official wording: this employee updates the prices of all items in an entire neighbourhood at once, and higher-skilled ones also suggest the best prices each day. That is the first bulk pricing tool in the game. See pricing manager.
Exporting now feeds back into prices. Official 1.0 wording: exporting goods impacts the import index, so exporting too much drops that item's import and export price for the rest of that week. Overproduction is now self-penalising within the week.
Shortages raise demand. A vendor-side shortage temporarily increases customer demand for the affected item, so holding stock through one is worth more than usual.

What the achievement data says about scale

Steam's global unlock rates, pulled 8 September 2026, are the only public measurement of how far players actually push a supply chain. No other Big Ambitions site publishes these.

Achievement	Threshold	Global unlock
Hoarder, Bronze	Stockpile 100,000 of any product	7.3%
Hoarder, Silver	Stockpile 2,000,000	0.5%
Hoarder, Gold	Stockpile 10,000,000	0.3%
Executive Producer, Bronze	Produce 10,000 items in a factory	1.9%
Executive Producer, Silver	Produce 100,000 items	1.2%
Executive Producer, Gold	Produce 1,000,000 items	0.5%
Storage King, Bronze	Rent 2 warehouses	21.7%
Product Pusher, Bronze	Run 1 retail business	75.9%

Read together: roughly three quarters of players open a shop, about one in five rents a second warehouse, and fewer than one in fifty ever produces 10,000 items in a factory. Manufacturing is the least travelled part of the game, which is also why the community documentation for it is the thinnest and the most contradictory. Full table on the achievements page.

Factory output is one more place to be careful. A widely copied community figure gives an hourly raw material consumption for expensive clothes and multiplies it into a weekly total. It is single-source, Early Access era, and EA 0.10 states that "factory line production speeds have been ramped up" and that Factory Worker skill now noticeably affects production, so the figure cannot be current. What is safe: EA 0.10 made every product producible by factories, and 1.0 fixed factories refusing to produce when shelf space was limited but not exhausted.

Change log

8 September 2026: Page created. Product additions sourced to the official EA 0.10, EA 0.11 and 1.0 changelogs; categories from the 1.0 era Warehouse page. Three community wiki conflicts recorded without picking a side, including factory-to-shop delivery and the seven-versus-eight importer count. No price table, by policy. See EA vs 1.0 for the full version comparison.

Frequently asked questions

How do products get into a shop in Big Ambitions?

Three routes. You can drive to a wholesaler and carry goods back yourself, you can set a weekly delivery contract with a wholesaler that ships straight to the shop, or you can import in bulk to a warehouse and have a Logistics Manager push stock out to your shops. The third route is the only one that scales, and it needs a Purchasing Agent and a Logistics Manager working from computer workstations in your Headquarters.

What is the difference between a wholesaler and an importer?

A wholesaler is the low-volume source you use early: you can buy from it in person and take the goods away yourself, and self-collected purchases do not count against the weekly delivery limit. An importer is the high-volume source on the piers and it cannot deliver to a shop at all, only to a warehouse or factory that has free pallet shelf space. Importers also need a Purchasing Agent under contract. These details come from Early Access era community pages, though the 1.0 changelog confirms the roles and the weekly limits still exist.

Can a factory deliver goods straight to a shop?

The community wiki contradicts itself on this and we are not going to pretend it is settled. Its Buildings page states plainly that only warehouses can deliver to shops, so a factory must ship to a warehouse first. Its Importers page describes a Logistics Manager distributing stock from your warehouse or factory to your retail stores. Both pages are on the same wiki, so this is one source disagreeing with itself rather than two sources disagreeing.

How many importers are there in Big Ambitions?

Either seven or eight, depending on which page you read. The community wiki's Importers page names seven: JetCargo, SeaSide, United Ocean, BlueStone, Lunar Tide, Maritime Freight and Aquatic Bay. Its Warehouse page has a column for an eighth, Global Harvest. The official EA 0.10 notes describe Piers 1 to 4 as product importers and Piers 6 to 9 as raw goods importers, which fits eight, but the changelog names no companies so it does not close the question.

What products were added late in Early Access and in 1.0?

EA 0.10 added Popcorn, Cotton Candy, Slushies and a Cheese Platter for cinemas and theatres, and made Cups of Tea sellable from the same Industrial Coffee Machines that make coffee. EA 0.11 added the Energy Drink, sellable in supermarkets, liquor stores, nightclubs, gift shops and gyms. Version 1.0 added no new sellable goods that the official changelog names; it changed how existing stock is distributed and priced.

Why does this page not list product prices?

Because a second-hand price table would be worse than the one that already exists. Biggerambitions.com has been measuring per-item buy and sell prices since 2023 and has updated its tables for 1.0, including the seventh neighbourhood. Copying those figures here would produce numbers that rot silently the next time the economy is patched, and 1.0 rebalanced banking and tax while EA 0.11 adjusted business profitability. We describe the pricing mechanism instead.