This week on the return of the Manage Comics Thoughtstream, we talked about our recent updates and what’s going on next. We showed our “white label” customer videos which stores can use to share with their own customers, and we took questions and answers.
- Recent Updates
- What We’re Working On
- What’s Up Next
- Customer Sign Up Video
- Questions and Answers
- Next time on the Thoughtstream
Recent Updates
We post all of our updates to our ChangeLog – which is where you’ll find all of the fixes we make. We did a ton of fixes over the holidays and have added a lot of Quality of Life updates.
Customer Orders
We completely revamped the order flow, removing our previous flow of invoicing all orders immediately. We now have an area where you can invoice your customers, and if they come in to the store, you can invoice them in shop. This area is getting an overhaul this week as we improve this for in-store customers even more.
Pulled Items displayed on Customer Page
Due to our flow changes, we added a “My Pulled Orders” area to the site, which lets customers see what was pulled for them and when it was pulled. We will be adding external customer emails to this flow soon so that your customers will get weekly emails letting them know what was pulled for them.
Ratio Cover Fixes
We changed both the customer and the admin side of the site to consistently display ratio covers.
We also added a setting to allow a store to disable the display of ratio variants, although you still have access to those in the admin screens.
Improvements to the Pulls Reports Page
On the front end, we now show publisher on the Pulls by Date report, we have also added a new downloadable CSV file which allows you to slice and dice your pulls by everything including Name, ID, Qty, Title, Publisher, Distributor and Price.
Download all Subscription Files – Including Inactive Subscriptions
We needed a way to display both active and inactive customers, so we added a CSV file to the top right corner which lets you download all of your subscribers.
We have larger changes to the customer lists page coming this week, including a complete revamp on how this page works.
Other Quality of Life Improvements
- Implemented sorting to Initial Order/FOC Orders
- Change price on Product Checkin
- Add item code to pre-order screen
- Data Whack A Mole – constantly fighting with Data systems and making them continually bigger and better
What We’re Working On
Improve the Edit Order Screen – We are adjusting the Edit Order Screen to accomodate different use cases such as a customer wanting to leave books in their file, or things not being able to be sold because of street dates.
Update missing products by UPC code – most products that are missing on your invoice are in our database under a different code. By adding this we will eliminate a lot of extra data entry.
Ratio Numbers missing on Customer Activity – we’re adding the number to the Customer Activity screen because it was missing from there.
Customer Lists – Stores with 1000+ Shopify customers have some problems with the All Customers page loading, stores with 300+ subscription customers have issues with this page not being useful.
B Covers – Marvel in particular has ratio covers listed as what we consider “B” Covers. We need to get this sorted out.
Penguin Data Enhancements – getting more data in our system through Penguin Random House info which is now the gold standard of solicit info for us, but the data itself needs a bit of help.
What’s Up Next
Our biggest priority is what we call “Enhanced FOC / Initial Order capabilities“, this will not only involve showing Shelf Copies, Subscriber Copies, and a lot of improved sorting abilities.
Our second phase of this will be to include sales history numbers and order history numbers.
Our other major task is changes for UK stores, our friends in the UK have a ton of problems when it comes to Diamond info, as well as pricing challenges. We want to simplify this for them.
Shopify POS Enhancements – we want to build our own ShopifyPOS app to handle Shopify better.
Customer Sign Up Video
We put together a couple of “white label” videos for you to share with your customers, where we used a very generic looking Example Shop to create our pages.
The Manage Comics 2 Sign On video helps your customers get signed on to Manage Comics through your Shopify store. This took a LOT of trial and error on our part to figure out what the flow is, but now that we have done it a few times, it makes a bit of sense, although it is not intuitive.
What Can You Do with Subscriptions will show your customers how their Manage Comics subscription account works, how things like pre-orders, and cover ordering works, and some basic flow of the site.
On the Next Thoughtstream
We’re talking Shopify emails and getting the most out of emails within Shopify to communicate to your Manage Comics users…and more!
Manage Comics 2022 Road Map