What a turn represents
Setup is turn 0 (business type, niche, difficulty, starting cash). After that, each executed turn is one decision cycle: you choose marketing, product, conversion, and retention actions; the engine updates metrics and cash; random events and difficulty rules can fire. There is no fixed end date—you play until you reset or (on harder settings) hit a cash or debt failure.
A phase is one month of business, including seasonality (January is slow for most niches, the fourth quarter is strong for gifts). Use it to feel timing and trade-offs, then map winners onto your real reporting cadence.
Niche baselines
Starting conversion rate, AOV, retention, LTV, and CAC come from niche baselines in the simulation engine (for example fashion vs supplements vs electronics). Gross margin is also clamped by niche so you cannot invent a 90% margin apparel store without consequences. Hard mode multiplies acquisition pressure so careless paid spend burns cash faster.
The revenue band you choose at setup sizes the whole store: traffic, stock, always-on spend, starting cash and the cost of a restock all scale with it, so a $50k–$250k store opens with roughly that revenue. The top two bands are simplified (no staff or payroll). Customer acquisition cost is set to what the niche really costs: a few dozen dollars for everyday products, a few hundred to a few thousand for software and services, usually 20–25% of the first deal for consulting and agency work.
How margin and cash move
Revenue each turn is driven by traffic × conversion × AOV (with action and event modifiers). Cost of goods and other variable costs pull contribution; paid actions spend cash immediately. Cash runway is the failure constraint on stricter difficulties—positive ROAS with negative cash is still a failed run.
Profit and cash are not the same thing, and the model shows both. Each sale pays card fees (2.9% plus 30¢; 12% on marketplaces; 1% on invoices) and, for stocked ecommerce, about $6 of shipping and fulfilment. Stock you hold is paid for when you restock and only reaches your profit as it sells, so cash falls at the purchase order and cost of goods counts when units sell. A paid campaign is charged once. Break-even revenue (fixed costs divided by margin per sale) and profit per customer sit on the dashboard so you can see whether growth is actually making money.
The advanced dashboard can show illustrative cohort retention curves and extended metrics. Those curves are teaching defaults (for example an indexed 12-month retention shape), not your store’s cohorts. Pair them with our unit economics and contribution margin glossary entries when you want formula-level definitions.
Traffic, CAC, and LTV
Paid and organic actions shift traffic and effective CAC. Retention actions lift repeat purchase and LTV with lag—neglect decay and consequence chains mean one-off spikes do not stick forever. Channel attribution in the UI is a simplified split for learning, not Meta/Google multi-touch truth.
Different traffic fades at different speeds. Ad flights, email blasts, social posts and press mentions are spent within weeks. SEO, blog content and community are slow: new pages take about three months to reach full traffic, only some rank, and the traffic erodes each month unless you keep publishing. Each paid campaign and organic action shows a profit check estimating what it brings back per dollar over three phases for campaigns, six for conversion work and twelve for SEO and retention, using the same engine as the game.
Customer payback is judged the same way in every business model: what winning a customer costs against what each sale leaves after product, delivery and fees, and how many sales a customer makes. If a customer costs more than they return, buying more traffic makes the loss bigger.
Service businesses sell time. A solo operator delivers roughly four big engagements a month and each hire adds about three (more as the store grows), and deals are won or lost by chance, so a month can be zero or three clients. Leads past capacity are wasted until you raise prices, hire or subcontract.
What we intentionally simplify
- Tax, VAT, and multi-currency accounting are out of scope.
- The two largest revenue bands leave out payroll, hiring and org complexity.
- Inventory can matter in scenarios, but warehouse networks and lead-time SLAs are abstracted.
- Ad platforms are not live APIs—CPMs and ROAS respond to rules and RNG, not your account history.
- Valuation and leaderboard scores are game scoring, not diligence-ready enterprise values.
How to use the numbers
- Change one lever per run (price, creative spend, CRO) and note cash and contribution.
- Write down the assumption that broke (margin too thin, CAC too high, retention too slow).
- Re-check that assumption in your analytics or a spreadsheet—see simulator vs spreadsheets.
Full walkthrough: what the ecommerce simulator is and when to use it. Play: Ecommerce Simulator. Editorial stance: editorial standards.