If preferred I have a youtube video that covers everything here with visuals to be more understandable. This is the script for the video with a few changes in case it reads weird.

At its core, trade in Victoria 3 is all about goods and people. The game lets you simulate the full range of goods and services used during the time period, representing them with specific values for quantity and price. By understanding how these goods move around the world, you can effectively manage your nation's economy and maximize its potential. I do want to note this is not a meta guide, so I will not be teaching you the most jenky min maxed strats, the purpose is to give you understanding and enjoy the game Let's get started!

The game allows you to represent all goods people use in the time period in economic terms, represented by amount and price. The amount of a good in your market is based on what you produce, and what you trade for through importing or exporting. The most important metric though is the good price, as this is the sole determining factor for your buildings profitability, the investment pools gains, whether your pops can afford to buy enough of something, and whether you will be able to keep factories open. We are going to deal with the trading aspect here, which is how you can deal with needed goods or excess goods in your market. Lets say you have an excess of 50 tools.You could either keep the excess which makes them cheaper or export them to another country to level out your price. If you have tariffs aka a tax on goods sold or bought you will directly make money on this trade route but also make the goods less profitable for trade as the cost is factored into the final good price. On the other end of things lets say you have a deficit of 100 grain. You could spend construction power, time, and people as well as increasing the power of the landowners making it yourself. Or you could import it from another country. Generally speaking as with real life you want to produce high value goods for consumption and export, and import cheap ones. In the real world what separates modern wealthy economies from those who are on the poorer end is really about how their economy is constructed. Specialized high tech economies outperform basic good producers every time though its easier said than done.

The most important reason to trade is that it allows you to quickly get access to resources you need without making them yourself. All you have to do is wait for the trade level to go up and you will get access to a ton of cheap goods. There will not always be routes available to you, especially if its at the beginning of the game or youre a tiny power, but you can maneuver around this.

Trade grows your economy quicker than anything else. Your gdp and building profitability is based on the value of the good and its demand. Glass for example is incredibly valuable but if you produce more and more of it you will run out of domestic demand, aka the pop needs of your people and other buildings or construction where glass is needed. By exporting it you are able to find more demand and even raise the price at home, which makes the buildings more profitable and therefore the owners put that excess profit into your investment pool.

Dependent diplomacy is created when you make yourself so important to other countries' economies that they can't detach from you. Let's say you produce a lot of coal and tools as Prussia and trade a ton of it to France. The French economy if it was to stop receiving these goods would barely function due to how important both are in everything. By making other countries reliant on your exports you gain soft power over them.

You can’t move goods across water without ships. Almost all trade routes in Victoria 3 require convoys besides overland ones and even these may after a while. Each good type requires more or less convoys comparatively to move. In order to have a trade route increase its level and the amount of goods moved you must have an excess of convoys. Do note here that the game may say you have an excess of convoys, but if its less than 150 you may simply need more. A route may need more than you currently have a surplus of in order to level up so as a general rule try to have at least 200+ convoys in surplus if you are doing a lot of trading. It is also worth noting that the more sea trades nodes, aka distance, a route goes through the more convoys are needed. Meaning trade across continents is costlier that trading to a neighbor so you should always prioritize countries next to you or on a similar continent if you can.

Some trade is able to simply use your land routes though after 1.2 this has been changed. In the past you could trade an unlimited amount of goods across borders but now there is a limit on how many can be done before convoys are needed. This makes the innate insane power of Russia no longer as extreme. The decrease in convoy cost is still incredibly potent though so these routes are better period.

Every trade route you create has a level. The levels of a route increases the amount of goods moved and convoys utilized. Trade routes are not static and will grow and recede due to profitability and capacity which the level represents. If you have an excess of convoys and the route makes solid profit it will grow in an attempt to balance the good costs in both nations. If you or they lack the goods, lack convoys, or there are other trade routes with more profitability it will not grow . Lets say its early in the game and you have a ton of construction buildings but lack the wood input needed for them. If you open a trade route with Russia to import wood as its much cheaper there and more expensive in your country you will start to increase levels since you have the convoys needed lowering the price of good and increasing its quantity in your market.

Tariffs are the taxes a nation puts on trade. It is a complicated tool but can be understood simply. IF you tax a trade good you as the state make money off of it, at the cost of making it less competitive due to decreased profit and impacting price calculations. Lets say that you have a trade route for tools exports which nets you a solid profit, if that route is subjected to a 10% tariff, there are more costs on it meaning it is less profitable as the buyer in another market will shoulder the cost. Without the Tarriff the price of tools for importing lets say was 35, well below market price which is lower than then the other country. If you factor in the tariff of 10% for interventionism law that makes the actual price to the person trading for it 38.5. Perhaps the importer has an import Tariff too of 10% that means the final cost is in reality 42 making the good much more expensive than you would expect. Victoria 3 is amazing at making one have to juggle the benefits and downsides of economic policy. If you go for say free trade where you have no tariffs it means most countries will love trading for your goods or letting you import them, but you make no money directly on the flows of goods which is a lot of lost profit directly. If you have high tariffs you are able to make a lot of money on trade but your market is less competitive and overall less trading will likely be done. Generally though as a player it is key to understand that although clicking tariffs may make you money, it has a heavy cost. In fact im going to straight up say it, tariffs suck. They're really really bad. After playing this game I now understand the anger my economics professor had in college when talking about them in class with a look that would make you think they had killed his wife and her boyfriend.

Where tariffs come from are your laws for Trade Policy which vary in amount, which you can see by hovering over them. Keep in mind the default for them is the baseline tariff amount, you can lower and increase it for Mercantilism and Protectionism. These give you the ability to protect or open up certain goods for trade.

Lets say you need more wood for construction, as you want to build more sectors or decrease the cost which for all construction in your main Queue is footed by you. If you are Interventionist in your Trade policy you can protect your supply by going to the good menu in your market and clicking it This will increase the cost for anybody wishing to trade for it with you. Before a 10% tariff would make the good cost for trading not taking into account any tariffs the other country have which they certainly do 51.4 After hitting that button the cost is 65 which makes it incredibly unprofitable. Current routes will drop levels and most countries will not be able to trade for it unless they're insanely costly in tier nations.

Alternatively, encouraging exports will remove tariffs entirely for your nation while putting huge import costs on any countries trying to export their goods to you.

Tariffs are a useful tool, but again bad generally.

If you have low tariff laws like free trade you are able to buy cheap goods from one country and with the reduced prices in your own market, then resell it to other countries taking the profit for yourself and increasing your trade centers and therefore income and investment pool. Many nations will not have the convoy and trade infrastructure needed to export a lot of their goods, especially in singleplayer. IF you build up a large convoy and trade route system you can easily start to identify countries especially those near you to resell made even better with trade agreements and trade competitiveness.

Every trade route you start creates a trade center for each level. Trade centers are buildings that you cannot control yourself directly. They appear with trade lanes and can only be gotten rid of by removing the route entirely. These buildings are very useful as they provide profits, urbanization, and migration attraction for the state at the cost of wages and a tiny bit of infrastructure usage which is only 1 for every 10 levels. They also receive the benefits from throughput meaning that larger trade routes become more profitable and provide even more urbanization. Where the centers appear is semi-random with any area where a connection can be made is possible, but normally its in coastal areas with ports or the capital. They are most useful when Privately owned as their excess profit which is easy to get with routes is reinvested into the investment pool from the capitalists.

Trade agreements are a diplomatic deal you can make with another country in the game. In order to get one, you will need to have good diplomatic relations as well as be trading a large amount with them at least for AI countries. A nation is unlikely to want to make a costly deal like this with countries they arnt huge trade partners with. The benefit of the deal is that AI countries prefer trading with you over others, your routes cost no bureaucracy, and your routes are more competitive by a whopping 50%. Above all else though it is that it removed all tariffs for routes, meaning the excess cost added to good values for trade are gone entirely which is incredibly powerful. It is worth trying to get these with large economies with lots of cheap goods who can also buy ridiculous amounts of produced goods like Russia, the Qing, and France, and the UK as soon as possible.

As I said before there are a few techs which are important for trade so lets cover them here.

All production techs of course help as if you have the edge on other producers in being able to make a good cheaper and in higher quantities you will be more competitive price wise.

The port techs on the left side of military all give increased port level in a state which is great if you keep running out of ports and convoys in areas as a smaller country. They also allow more in one area so concentrating your routes through trading megacities becomes more relevant.

Gantry cranes and ironclads combined allow you to get Industrial ports which double your convoy output as well as making your jobs used more advanced such as machinists. This is massive as you will start to run low on them unless you have tons of possible ports like the UK

Concrete dockyards give you modern ports which doubles the convoy amount again again.

International trade and stock exchange are early techs and you will normally have them, but if you start with no techs as a small country these are absolutely required to start trading as most of your options are locked behind them

All of the far left techs in society increase your land trade limit, meaning the amount of goods that can be traded over a land border without needing convoys.

And lastly macroeconomics, which although a very late game tech is the best for trade period. It allows way more goods to be traded as well as giving another 25% competitiveness bonus on top.

I want to take a moment to point out something that is important to understand. The AI in Victoria 3 are quite basic and will change their behavior unintelligently though some mods like Anbeelds help. If you creat artificial supply and demand it changes their perception of everything and your trading actions impact them heavily. Lets say you dont build any wood as France and import it from Russia with a trade agreement. This perpetually keeps the price of wood there high as long as you keep needing more telling the Russian AI it needs more wood. They take the price into account primarily and the trade deal will make it seem high for them. They will keep making more wood to compensate for this. This gives you the bonus of having another country do your dirty work and will stop them from industrializing. If you had instead imported tools from them or glass an industrial good, they would produce more of that adding more pops which are in favor of the industrialists or intelligentsia, whereas those in a logging camp will be politically disengaged. I use this to stress that your trading and economy itself will cause a butterfly effect and change the whole game politically and economically which is cool as hell but also a warning. With great power comes great responsibility.

Related to this is teh effect on the Automatic or private construction portion of your economy. The investment pool which is added to over time automatically builds buildings which you do not get to choose in your country. Just because you dont pick them doesn't mean you cant influence them or nudge them in the right direction. They will always prioritize profitable goods, as it is run and from capitalists who seek the highest return on investment possible. This means the goods that are most expensive will be prioritized. Keeping a good price low will cause buildings for it to be much less likely to be produced privately. Lets use the wood example again from AI behavior, importing the wood from the Russian AI impacts that country greatly but it also changes yours. By having the price of wood be balanced and optimally decreased you will have a lower chance that logging camps will be built in your nation by capitalists which is good. Buildings pop change politics and wealth, even standard of living so the things you choose to build as well as trade for impact your private construction, keep this in mind always.

Lastly it is important to mention treaty ports. These are prizes gained through wars with other powers that lets you take a tiny piece of their land. Why do this and not a whole area? It allows you access to their market and gives your overland bonuses. Being next to them decreases convoy cost massively and makes the countries there to be more willing to trade with you.

I hope this tutorial helped you understand trade in victoria 3. Any questions or clarification needed please leave a comment and I will do my best to answer it in a reasonable time frame. I will be putting out a series of Victoria 3 tutorials covering the main components of the game so go ahead and check out my channel for more vic related stuff. I also have a roleplay series for victoria if you enjoy that and steam on twitch.