How to fix the 'Not enough buyers for products' issue in Cities Skylines

Although sometimes it can be the reverse case, many players will run into the 'Not enough buyers for products' problem in Cities Skylines and wonder where they have gone wrong, and what they can do to fix it. City building games will throw a wide range of issues at their prospective mayors and Cities Skylines is no different, requiring you to carefully micromanage every part of your metropolis. So, if you’re stuck with this specific problem, make sure to read on for the fix and more detail into the cause itself.

How to solve the problem

There are a handful of different actions you can take to deal with the 'Not enough buyers for products' problem in Cities Skylines, and they are as follows:

• Play around with your zoning for industry and commercial
• Increase your exports
• Improve your inter-city connections

It is all about creating a general balance between what your industry is creating, and where it can be sent to. Even if you don’t have enough commercial zoning in your city, there is always going to be somewhere to send your products if you look hard enough.

Play Around With Your Zoning For Industry And Commercial

The most obvious thing you can do to deal with the problem is to decrease your industry, or increase your commercial zoning. This is a more head-on approach to the supply and demand issue, by either decreasing the amount of products being supplied, or increasing the demand for said products.

You do have to be very careful to not go too far in the other direction though, as that can easily mean that you end up with the not enough goods to sell problem. It is better to approach it in increments, and slowly tweak the amount bit by bit.

It is also generally better to favour increasing your commercial zoning over decreasing your industry, as this will not only bring you more money and make your citizens happier, but also prevent the loss of taxes by removing pre-existing industry buildings. 

You do of course have to have the RCI demand to satisfy this expansion though, and while it would make sense that an excess of products would necessitate a demand for commercial expansion, it does not mean that your population wants the shops in the first place.

Increase Your Exports

What you can do, however, if you don’t have the demand to increase commercial zoning in your own city, is to send it elsewhere. It can always be someone else’s problem, right? Exports are an excellent tool to get rid of excess product though, while making a potentially large sum of money as well. 

If you put enough of a focus on exports you can actually position it as your main moneymaker, and increase your industry even further to become the supplier to the rest of the world. 

You will of course need to build the correct infrastructure to be able to export goods however, so building cargo outsourcing links like trains and ferries is essential if you want to keep up with the amount of produce you are creating. Furthermore, having an efficient way for general industry traffic to get out of your city can also be a real help, as it is useless if they need to go through your entire residential zones to reach the main roads to export-ville.

Improve Your Inter-City Connections

It might seem rather silly, but the last thing you can do to deal with the problem is to improve your inter-city connections - after all, your products might not actually be able to get to the demand. 

There are few moments in Cities Skylines where you feel stupider than realising that you have forgotten to connect your fancy new district to the rest of your city, leaving it isolated and frustratingly untouched. This is the case for industry too, as the most important thing is actually having a route for imports and exports to actually take, otherwise the goods will just sit there with no one to pick them up. 

It doesn’t even need to be a hard disconnect from the rest of your city, where you have forgotten to place an attaching road. It can instead just be an inefficient traffic system, or a super long route that the cargo has to take. If the goods are taking forever to actually get to the commercial zones because they are on the other side of the city, it is an inevitability that the production will eventually outpace the speed you can send it out.

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What is the problem?

You will likely run into the 'Not enough buyers for products' problem in Cities Skylines if your industrial supply outweighs the demand of your commercial zones. This can largely be sourced from a number of different instances, but the basic understanding of the situation is that your industry is creating too much, without anywhere to send it.

This is almost the inverse of the Cities Skylines not enough goods to sell problem, where your commercial businesses are not receiving enough product from the industry, and thus have too much demand to match the supply.

You’re likely to experience both of these problems at some point in any save, as you try and find the perfect balance between industry and commercial zoning, but thankfully there are a handful of ways to deal with this problem when it arises, or even avoid it occurring in the first place.

So, that wraps up our guide on how to solve the 'Not enough buyers for products' problem in Cities Skylines, giving you the three main causes of the issue and how to deal with each of them. If you’re fed up with having to think too hard and want to just build creatively, why not check out these Cities Skylines cheats, and go wild.