Development Update – Manage Comics Thoughtstream

On this week’s Manage Comics Thoughtstream, we reviewed our survey results, did a demo of Manage Comics 2.0, and took questions from our awesome viewers.

Up first we talked about our survey, we asked you what you wanted to see with future Manage Comics Thoughstream Episodes.

Overwhelmingly the #1 request was Development updates, followed by Manage Comics features.

The rankings were:

1. Dev News (64)
2. MC Features (49)
3. Product Info (19)
4. Data News (18)
5. Retail Info (16)
6. Store Spotlights (2)

I think right now Development news makes the most sense, so we’ll focus on that for the foreseeable future, but I also want to get some info into how stores are actually using Manage Comics, so we’ll be working on that for our next episode.

In terms of Days and Times, Thursday at 3pm was the winner, but we also had some requests for Mondays.  For now we’ll stick with Thursdays, but we will experiment with both the time, and the day in the future.

What day works best for you?

• 50% Thursday
• 39% Monday
• 11% Tuesday

What time works best for you?

• 44% 3pm ET / 12pm PT
• 22% 1pm ET / 10am PT
• 17% 5pm ET / 2pm PT
• 6% 7pm ET / 4pm PT
• 6% 10am ET / 7am PT
• 6% 10pm ET / 7pm PT

Development Updates:

It was a good week even with one of our developers on vacation, as we knocked off another group of tasks. Shortly after the livestream ended, Taras sent me another whack of tasks that were completed to end the week with a lot of bug stomping.

• BUG: FOC Error
• As a store, I want to set my distributors
• As a customer, I want to be able to sort by type when on a publisher
• As a customer, I want to be able to sort by publisher when on a type
• BUG: Do not order from this line products show up
• BUG: FOC Uploads are in the wrong format
• BUG – Items that are not subscribable have “Subscribe to Series” on them
• BUG: “Other Publishers” links to everything, even things that are turned off in the settings.
• BUG: Items show even when they are past FOC date

This week the team is working on PRH enhancements, and single issue subscriptions (while not making the interface a nightmare for customers).

You’ll see our full list of what we’re working on under the video this week, as well as some screen shots of what the new interface for adding single issues will look like.

What we’re working on:

• BUG: As a store, I can accidentally create “Ghost Subscriptions”
• As a store, I want to create initial orders with Penguin Random-House
• As a store, I want to import my customers from Manage Comics 1.0
• As a store, I want to import my subscriptions from Manage Comics 1.0
• As a customer I want to easily Subscribe to Single Issue, Subscribe to Series, Subscribe to Cover
• As a customer, I would like to understand how the Add, Delete, QTY
• As a store owner, I would like to see discounts on all of my customers
• As a store, I want to know what customers are Manage Comics customers
• As a store, I want to know which customers have been disabled for Manage Comics in Shopify.

What we’re analyzing and creating specs for:

• As a store, I want my initial order and FOC reporting to show order history and sales history
• As a store, I want to change the “Pulls” concept to “Check In”
• As a store, if a customer adds a pre-order, deleting it should require approval by the shop owner
• As a Non US Store, I want to set prices on a price matrix
• As a customer, like products should be grouped
• As a store, I want the admin of adding subscriptions/pre-order to be more graphical (similar to the web side)

Go behind the curtain

When we create a task for the development team, we also build out the screen flows and show how the page will work.

This is the hardest part of the job as we review all of the “user interface” options and decide how the pages will work.

In this case we need to take a lot of different factors into consideration. Subscribing to a series, subscribing to a specific cover, ordering a specific issue, and showing what you will get after the fact.

Get notified about next week’s Thoughtstream!

Next week will be a celebration of our Manage Comics beta stores, we’ll showcase the stores we’re working with to improve and polish up Manage Comics, show off their Shopify stores, and possibly even talk to some of our awesome store owners!