I would like to hear about your experiences with running a clothing store. You might have had some more insights to it as I am only back to the game since couple of days after not being able to play for while.
I am running a clothing store combined with a hair salon at the moment. For the hair salon part all seems to run as expected. But for the clothing store I have a couple of issues & questions. Not sure if my game is behaving as it should or this might be a bug.
Before reaching 1 star it was nearly impossible to get any customer to a stage that he / she would buy anything. This got better after reaching 1st star and customers were making positive buying decisions with some help of my Zoi offering them a sales pitch.
And here the strange behavior starts. Some customers behave as expected. Make the decision, go to the kiosk and then go to the mannequin with the outfit and buy. Others though make the decision, then walk around to get some snacks, chat with somebody else, go to the kiosk, do something else again and only then go zo the mannequin to finally purchase the outfit. Sometimes this whole process takes around an hour which lets miss you out on the sale especially in the last hour of opening hours.
And in some cases even worse where the customers completely forget to purchase the outfit.
Here are 2 examples:
This lady has made her decision to buy but then goes to chat around with another customer:
Then she moves to the kiosk but unfortunately we do not get the money at this point yet and only if she really gets the outfit at the mannequin. This she just does not do. Instead she basically leaves the shop without getting the outfit and giving my Zoi the money:
This other guy was even better… He went straight to the kiosk after making his decision, but then he first got himself some snacks:
He enjoyed his chips and went to the kiosk again instead to the mannequin which would have been the next step in the purchasing process:
But then again great hunger for chips overcame him and he had to get some more and enjoy these as well:
And here I finished documenting as he did all other imaginable stuff in the shop and was hanging around for several hours more but never purchased an outfit.
Is this happening in your games as well?
Just had an interesting observation on this one. I left my Zoi with her shop alone and played another family for a week (my current save is a rotational one). Now I visited her again to check how the business is running without me being present. And interestingly she is now doing much more menu sales, like 4-5 times more per day. Still the same star rating and similar customer count per day.
All this menu sales cannot be hairstyles as you can only do 1 hairstyle per customer per day - so this means autonomously the outfit sales works well but not so much when you are around.
Will have to check when I play with her again if it also makes a difference when you just send her to work and let her and her employee run the shop without intervening vs. playing actively during the shop hours.
Any experiences you have made with clothing shops?
Running a clothing store became completely incomprehensible to me. After an unsuccessful flower shop and café, selling clothes is an unsolvable puzzle that I never managed to understand. I simply stopped trying business — it’s non-functional and incomprehensible to me. I stopped playing, built a new house, and haven’t logged back into the game. I’m tired of stressing over inadequate game content.
This is my small shop.
This is the small house where my Zoi lives.
I don’t want to play and build anymore; I’m tired of constant errors.
@NyushaDm so sorry to read that…
And you’re right, there are way too many bugs in the business system where nobody seems to focus on.
But why were you flower and Café businesses unsuccessful?
The flower shop and café were in the same building, separated by a partition, with different entrances.
The hired employees would run across the street to place coffee cups on the flower displays and vice versa, putting flowers on the food counter.
Employees wouldn’t show up to work or would do work that I hadn’t assigned them.
They would completely clear the counters, throwing out fresh flowers and fresh food.
They could spend half the day chatting with customers without restocking the counters and displays.
Huge numbers of visitors in the store — they got in the way of staff and me, were constantly stuck in the doorway, didn’t buy anything, just crowded around and chatted.
Profits were poor.
I got tired of this lack of control and couldn’t reach the fifth level, so I quit playing.
@NyushaDm that sounds terrible…
I did a shop with everything in Iit for testing purposes for my business guide. This had coffee, cocktails, food, flowers, lectures and massages. I must say that most of the things you are describing happened to me too: employees were not really efficiently doing what they were supposed to do and sometimes even blocking each other out. They were overwriting display cases with stuff in there and placing food on wooden stands and flowers in the refrigerated ones. Nevertheless profit was always good. It was just annoying that your shop looked so wrong with all the food without cooling and flowers with way too much cooing, I really hope they fix it soon so that this is reasonably playable for all players.
I was also disappointed and confused at the clothing store.
I was convinced that the NPCs would wear the clothes we sell in the store instead of the in-game outfits. But I was let down. The NPCs would leave the store in the clothes they’d bought, but after some time they would change back into their in-game clothes and never wear the purchased outfit again. I was upset — what was the point of all my effort in creating new beautiful clothes if they have no use, why bother with these complicated sales at all.
I didn’t even understand how the transaction works. If I didn’t manually approach the customer, if I didn’t interact with them through the in-game menu, then the transaction wouldn’t happen. All the NPCs and my in-game Zoi would just stand there and do nothing.
I stopped wasting time trying to figure out whether this was a bug or if the developer designed it this way on purpose. I just stopped caring.
I came into the game to have fun, not to identify bugs and be frustrated by confusion about what’s happening on the screen.
That’s my gaming experience after spending 2151 hours in the game.
INZOI is my deep disappointment.
I respect all of your hard work and the effort you’ve put into collecting data about gameplay! Your guides are beyond praise! They are invaluable. But, looking at the further development of the game… It’s sad to see that your work is in vain, because the developers have moved away from the original business model, and now everything works differently and with different data. Thank you for your invaluable work! 
@NyushaDm there are still good things in the game, I hope you don’t give up completely!
On the clothing store after my testing of approximately 2 in game weeks and reaching 3 stars with the shop: the selling / procurement process indeed is a little strange. As mentioned at 0 stars the customers nearly never reached a positive buying decision at all. Then starting from 1 star, 2 stars and so on they still took quite a while but some where reaching a positive decision by checking out the outfits, trying these on etc. sometimes I helped to finalize the decision with a sales pitch as well. Then they normally move to the kiosk to order and then to the mannequin to really purchase the outfit. In this final buying process there is a bug as well that some Zois forget to finally buy the outfit after they made a positive decision which is annoying - I already reported this . But still even with this I was making some profit with the shop. The strange thing was that when I left the household and checked back in one week later after playing a different household I saw that she was doing 4-5 times more profit with the shop when left on her own.
Regarding the employees you’re right. There is not so much to do, they normally recommend outfits to support the decision process and manage the outfits. The purchasing process via employee does not seem to work. I first had this setting on but then went back to the ordering kiosk as I had the feeling that nobody buys at all with the order with employee option on.
I also have the feeling that the speed for the buying decisions becomes faster with each star, so more customers really buy outfits.
Regarding the outfits not being worn: I had the same impression at first for the same reasons. But then I played another household and was surprised to see Zois around running in my outfits. Every now and then you see somebody wearing those outfits around in the city. So this seems to work actually, maybe it just takes a couple of days or weeks before you start noticing it. Maybe enough Zois need to buy the outfits in order to reach a critical mass, so that you run by those Zois by coincidence when in the city.
Thank you sooo much 
@NyushaDm
And please don’t give up on the game, it has many flaws but I still think we will get there at the end.
Also you were building incredibly nice shops (not sure if these are also on Canvas) but you should not stop with it 
@NyushaDm thank you so much
I hope you will try out soon again! I actually might have discovered the new highest profit items for our businesses 
I was also unable to play for some moths as I had to travel a lot. And now that I am back to the game I am seeing that they have also added wooden sculptures to the recipes for selling. These depend on the Handiwork skill and I was not expecting so much first as they cost only 5, 15 and 30 Mew to make depending on skill level. But as I had the plan to run a flower shop with one of my Zois who had both gardening and handiwork on level 10, I decided to combine the shop for sculptures and flowers. Now that she has made a couple of these sculptures I see that the selling price for a perfect sculpture which costs 30 to make is already 700 Mew at 0 stars. Given how all the other sale items sell for more with each star this might go up to 1000 Mew or something with higher star rating and might be the new highest profit items.
I have just prepared the shop and will start playing with open business today so let’s see how often and how easy these are sold.
Happy to share once I have some more insights! Hopefully this will work well and will cause the willingness to play again for you as well 
@NyushaDm just catched such a moment where a Zoi is wearing my outfit from the shop running around in the city. As you can see in one of the screenshots in my initial post this is one of the outfits my shop is selling. And here a random Zoi on the street is wearing it. I don’t know if this dress fits so well with the backpack but Ok, that’s her own choice
I absolutely love business stuff, but I’ve only tried running a bakery and sometimes I’ll admit it drives me crazy, because so many people go to drink water from the sink even though I put in a water dispenser so they wouldn’t go into the kitchen and nothing works.. haha
Businesses are very finicky… You have to place the doors in a certain direction so customers cannot waltz everywhere, even though they don’t have the permission to even enter. For the longest time the customers would blockade my whole kitchen until I found the issue with the doors 
I didn’t have the patience to discover this! Thank you for taking the time to check it! 
That’s an interesting discovery! I didn’t dare try the sculptures, afraid of even more disappointment. Thank you for boldly trying out the new content and sharing the experience with disappointed folks like me! I’ll be waiting for your recommendations!!!
I’m so happy that this is working properly! Thank you