Best Vendor Scores

I seem to be doing ok at most aspects of the game, except for "Best Vendor".

I can see how the formula works, and with it being in direct competition with Best Manufacturer I presume the trick is to try and balance the two out.

However, very rarely do products seem to come onto the market at a price where it is profitable to resell them. Indeed, often they are priced so that who ever buys them would make a loss. For example, at the moment on the market are some marbles, ql 24 priced at 6,000. The norm price is given as 3,411 and I understand the formula for the maximum you can sell products for is norm price * (1.5 + ql/100) which gives a max price of 5935.

So, either my understanding of pricing is wrong (possible!) or people are buying products to sell at a loss in order to build up their best vendor ranking.

Or of course something else is going on... but I'm obviously doing something wrong as I'm pretty much last in this ranking and despite doing ok in everything else it's really dragging me down in the overall scores.

Is anyone able to offer some kind of explanation... please!?

Thank you

And there was me thinking the way to do well in this game was to make a profit!

Of course, but the concept is still "reduce your profit to rank better in the high scores" which is a little odd!

Also, when you have a store that can sell one the items needed to manufacture other products (for example, a DIY store selling lumber) are you penalised for your entire production of that item even though you have no intention of selling it, and are using it to make other items?