The rules of the world in Komrce simulations
This is not a report. It is a map of the mechanics: what moves the market, what moves customers and what moves money. Your session's figures (prices, volumes, results) live in your account and change after every round. The rules here do not change.
You run an online store. You are not alone in the market.
Every round is one quarter in the life of your company
Your team gets a working online store and a playing field shared with the other teams. Each round you make a set of decisions; when the round closes, the engine runs them across all teams at once, and only then do you find out what happened.
That is the difference from an exercise with a correct answer: your result does not depend only on what you chose, but on what the others chose at the same time. A good price becomes a bad one if three teams settle below it. An adequate ad budget becomes inadequate if everyone bids on the same people.
There is no elimination and no bankruptcy. You can go negative, you can run out of cash. The game continues, but it costs you. The only penalty is economic.
How you win
The final score is not revenue, not profit and not size. It is the sum of
the dividends you took out of the company over the course of the
game. Money left inside at the end does not count. Money taken out too early
leaves you without ammunition. This is the central tension of the simulation.
Where everyone starts
Every team starts identically: starting capital in the account, initial stock in the warehouse, a small operations and customer service team, a neutral reputation and a base of returning customers. From the first decision onward, the paths diverge.
One market, four worlds
The same money buys something different, depending on who spends it
The market is not a uniform mass of buyers. It is split into four segments that behave differently: some watch price closely, others barely at all; some return often, others almost never; some are many and cheap to reach, others few and expensive. You cannot be optimal for everyone at once. This is where strategy begins.
| Segment | Size | Price | Promos | Conversion | Returns |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wealthy / City WC | |||||
| Wealthy / Rural WR | |||||
| Modest / City MC | |||||
| Modest / Rural MR |
relative position between segments, not absolute value. For Price and Promos, the dots show how strongly the segment reacts.
The biggest is not the most profitable
Modest / City is by far the largest segment and converts best. But it is highly price sensitive and returns more than any other segment. High volume does not automatically become profit.
The smallest can be the calmest
Wealthy / Rural has the smallest population and the weakest base conversion, but it tolerates high prices and rarely returns. It is a margin market, not a volume market.
Demand is not unlimited
In each round, only a small part of every segment is actually on the market and can be bought through advertising. All teams bid on the same pool. As long as total demand fits inside the pool, everyone gets what they paid for. The moment the total exceeds it, cost per click steps up for everyone. The greater the pressure, the harsher the step. At full saturation, the same customer costs you five times as much.
Competitive pressure is visible to everyone, in real time. Nobody has an information advantage here, but not everyone reads it in time.
Seven decision categories, every round
Some are chosen per segment, others once for the whole company
- Prices: separately for each segment, together with your sales forecast. The forecast matters: the ad budget will not buy beyond what you projected, and whatever is left unspent returns to cash.
- Marketing: how much you allocate in total, how you split it between segments, and what share goes to brand instead of direct selling. Here you also decide how much you push toward new customers and how much toward those who have already bought.
- Promotions: a discount campaign, on or off. It cuts price and lifts conversion, but not equally in every segment.
- Inventory: how much stock you order. It arrives the following round, so you order for who you will be, not for who you are.
- Packaging: basic, standard or premium. One choice for the whole company.
- Delivery: per segment: paid by the customer, standard or express.
- People and money: hiring and layoffs, wage levels, repayments or new credit, and how much profit you pay out as dividend.
Packaging
- Basicno effect
- Standard▲
- Premium▲▲
Delivery
- Paid by the customer▼▼
- Standard▲▲
- Express▲▲▲
Brand builds slowly and never erodes
The share of budget you put into brand brings no sales that round. It builds brand equity, a capital that accumulates slowly, with a strict cap per round, and that never evaporates. What it buys you is two things: slightly better conversion everywhere, and traffic that arrives on its own, without paying for the click. Organic traffic grows with every point of brand, up to a ceiling.
It is the slowest lever in the game and the only one that works for you while you are not looking. Teams that ignore it entirely pay, round after round, the full price of every customer.
Reputation does not appear in the P&L. It shows up all over it.
NPS starts neutral and moves with how you treat your customers
Customer satisfaction (NPS) is not a decision. It is the consequence of the other decisions and, unlike them, it spreads. Good NPS cuts your returns, keeps your customers and makes your credit cheaper. Bad NPS does the opposite, on all three at once.
What raises it
- Premium packaging▲
- Express delivery▲
- Sufficient customer service▲▲
What lowers it
- Returns and stockouts▼▼▼
- Public backlash▼▼▼
- Negative cash▼▼
Customer service is a capacity, not an intention
Roughly one order in ten generates a support contact. Each agent can handle a limited number of requests per day, and how efficiently they work depends on how well they are paid: below a certain level, output drops; above it, output rises, but with a ceiling. If volume exceeds capacity, satisfaction falls no matter how good the product is.
What reputation buys you
- Fewer returns▼
- Better retention▲
- Cheaper credit▼
From revenue to dividend
The full journey of one euro through your company
From the price you collect, first comes the cost of goods, then packaging and delivery. That is gross margin. From it are subtracted, in order: performance advertising, brand investment, wages and overhead, warehouse rent, the penalty for stock held beyond capacity, interest on credit and, if you bought it, the market report. What remains is the round's net profit.
People are capacity, not budget
Each worker can process a fixed number of orders per day, adjusted by wage level. If you sell more than your team can process, the excess orders are lost: you paid for the advertising, you do not collect the revenue. Under-resourcing operations is the most expensive way to save money.
Wages are paid in full, no matter how busy people are. A wage that is too low reduces output; one that is too high stops raising it proportionally.
Credit: how much the bank gives you depends on you
The credit line is not a fixed sum. It is recalculated every round as the average of three benchmarks: your annualised profitability, the value of stock in the warehouse and annualised turnover. A company that grows soundly expands its own access to money.
The dividend is the score
You can pay out only a portion of accumulated profit, and never more than you actually hold. Every euro taken out is a euro that no longer buys stock, advertising or people next round, but it is the only euro that counts at the end.
Too early, you cut your growth. Too late, you are left with a beautiful company and a small score.
The market does not sit still
If the facilitator enables them, events strike rarely, but they strike
Occasionally a round brings an event outside your control. It can hit the whole market or a single segment, and when it happens you are warned as the round opens: you have time to react, not just to suffer.
Demand spike
Conversion climbs sharply. Whoever has stock and capacity wins the round; whoever does not, watches.
Competitor entry
A new player cuts into everyone's conversion. The market has not shrunk, it has simply been divided differently.
Shipping costs jump
Delivery gets suddenly more expensive. A thin margin turns negative without you changing a thing.
Public backlash
Reputation takes a direct hit, with effects visible for several rounds.
Everyone proposes. One signs.
Every team member has their own decision form and can fill it in completely. But when the round closes, only the captain's form reaches the engine. What the others fill in are proposals: the captain sees them field by field, with the differences from their own version highlighted.
This is not a technical limitation, it is a rule of the game. Business decisions are not made by arithmetic average, and disagreement has to be settled before the deadline, not hidden behind a vote. If nobody submits anything, the round closes with default decisions, usually the worst possible outcome.
The market report
For a fee, out of company cash, you can buy the market's aggregated data: what prices the others charge in each segment, how much they sell, what delivery and packaging strategies they use. It is anonymised: you see the market, not team X. One edition covers several rounds, so there is no point buying it every round. It is the only information in the game that costs money.
What is here and what is in your account
In this document
How the world works: the segments and the way they react, what decisions you have on the table, how demand forms, how reputation moves, how money circulates. It does not change from one session to the next.
In your account
What state the world is in right now: market prices, volumes, advertising pressure, your results and everyone else's, how many rounds remain and how long until the deadline. It changes after every round.
A word from the founder
I built Komrce because I kept seeing the same thing: people who knew what to do in theory, but froze when they had to make an actual decision.
Here, you get to make that decision and see what happens next. You are not risking real money, but you will quickly notice where rushing, overthinking or avoiding a difficult conversation can cost you.
My advice is simple. Do not play it safe just to avoid mistakes. Make the decision, look at the result and understand why it worked or why it did not.
The teams that do well are not necessarily the smartest. They are the ones that talk things through, make a decision and do it before the deadline.
Ionuț Radu MunteanuFounder, Komrce
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