by Brian Hibbs
(Author’s note: Let me apologize in
advance that this month’s column is a little wonk-y. Even for me!)
So, it took me
a while to enter the 20th century, but Comix Experience
is finally computerized now – our Point-of-Sales (POS) system went
live on 7/31, so we’ve had about two weeks of using it so far.
To say it’s made
a difference, even this early in the process would be an understatement.
It used to be that I would have to spend about 3-4 hours each week
walking the racks with a clipboard to reorder all of the things
we’d sold. Now? I press a button (well, OK, four clicks of the mouse),
and the system spits out an upload-ready order for Diamond. Even
with scanning through the list to look for mistakes, the entire
process is less than 20 minutes.
I used to spend
two hours a week (at least) walking the racks counting the periodical
comics so that we had accurate “cycle sheets” (week-by-week counts
of how the periodicals sold). Now? The
computer is automatically tallying everything you sell AS you sell
it, and I’ve got all of that time back.
Then there are
the jobs I was doing on my own because I couldn’t figure out how
to apportion the work to others in any way that made sense – like
setting up each month’s subscription list. Since I wanted a pull
list in alphabetical order, and since people didn’t turn in their
forms in alphabetical order, I was just doing the list creation
once a month in a single 5 hour burst of work. Now, since that’s
all in the computer, and, in fact, integrated to the heart of the
POS program, it doesn’t matter when you enter the data, because
it all spits out in alpha at the right time – which means any
staffer can enter the paperwork as it comes in, and I no longer
have to shoulder that burden solo.
At the least,
I’m probably going to “regain” about eight hours of time each week
doing repetitive data-gathering/analysis tasks – an entire “day’s”
worth of work! – as all of that “under the hood” stuff is now automated. That’s
a huge gain back in productivity, all from doing tasks that I didn’t
enjoy doing anyway. This will give me more time to focus on the
“selling” aspect of running a comics shop,
which should make the store stronger and better in just about
all ways.
Which is a damn great thing.
Now, as I mentioned
two months ago, the “entire industry” is about to switch over to
POS. Diamond, the Direct Market’s largest supplier by a good measure,
has partnered with Microsoft’s RMS,
a one-size-fits-all POS system, and is in the process of building
a front-end module for it that will handle the comics-specific things
(like “pull and hold” functionality, or cycle sheeting). If you’re
a retailer with a Diamond account (you need a retailer log-in),
you can find some details about Diamond’s efforts here.
I think that once
Diamond does their roll-out hundreds of stores are going to start
to make the shift to POS – because Diamond is going to make it “easy”
to do so.
In a lot of ways,
I’d compare the potential impact that this could have upon retail
to the late Carol Kalish’s program that had Marvel Comics provide
low-cost cash registers to retailers in the 1980s – prior to that
a really tremendous number of stores used the “cigar box” method
of keeping their cash, and pen-and-paper to track sales. The impact
this had on the general “professionalism” of stores was incredibly
significant, and I personally think it set the stage for the rapid
growth the industry experienced in the early 90s.
Point-of-Sale’s
impact will be much more significant – reordering book stock
becomes almost laughably easy, tracking trends becomes much faster,
and so on.
By having the
largest single supplier (if not exclusive, for a lot of stores)
spear-heading the move to POS, I suspect that a lot of “less savvy”
stores will jump aboard because it will be fairly “trivial” to do
so.
Diamond’s program,
of course, isn’t the only option. And there are certainly stores
out there that have already been using POS for years. Some
stores already use Microsoft’s RMS (without the Diamond “module”),
some stores use things like Quickbooks,
some stores use “home brewed” systems. There’s also the venerable
ComTrac, and
Dan Shahin of Hijinx Comics in San
Jose has a number of open source software tools.
That’s just off the top of my head.
Ultimately, I
decided to go with MOBY,
a POS system originating out of Starclipper in St. Louis. Part of this was from head-to-head comparisons at ComicsPRO’s
Las Vegas meeting
between RMS and MOBY – not only was MOBY stable and running already
for years in several stores, it appeared to do many things that
RMS wasn’t yet capable of (though Diamond’s development of their
module may change this), as well as presenting a sleeker user interface.
The other big factor was in meeting with MOBY’s programmer, Mark
Richman, and discussing several things I wanted to be able to do
with POS that would be unique to my specific operation (example:
support for a monthly store-generated subscription list, that filtered
out all of the stuff we weren’t offering) – so he added them to
MOBY for me. Now that was the kind of support I was looking for!
I’ve only been
using POS for two weeks now; and only the one system, so nothing
I say on the topic should probably be granted that much weight,
really, but I can already see how this is going to transform the
way that I operate my store, my ability to properly order things
that have fallen “off my radar”, my accidents in double or triple
ordering some material, my access to data for customer searches
and special orders, and so on. If I can enact even half of the efficiencies
that POS promises my store should quickly become that much more
efficient and profitable.
But, there’s at
least one rub – isn’t there always? And that’s in what data we can
automatically receive, and how it is presented.
It is my understanding
that most of the data Diamond uses with regard to title, price,
etc, for the brokered publishers (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image,
Wizard, etc) comes from those same publishers.
If they say such-and-such
is called “so-and-so”, well that’s just how it is, and the data
is ported over to the retailer without any other filters.
Thing is, databases
are really stupid, generally. They follow hierarchal rules for how
they display and parse, so there’s a real garbage-in, garbage-out
rule in making sure the data is right and makes sense over the long
haul.
Here’s an example:
Diamond invoices sort in straight alphabetical order – so a title
like PROMETHEA sorts like this on an invoice
PROMETHEA BOOK
FIVE
PROMETHEA BOOK
FOUR
PROMETHEA BOOK
ONE
PROMETHEA BOOK
THREE
PROMETHEA BOOK
TWO
This makes check-in
of product or product searches take that much longer.
It is my strongest
possible suggestion (and it was even before I started getting
intimately familiar with the guts of the Diamond database) that
all data going to Diamond follow this format:
[Title] [Format,
eg HC/SC/TP/GN] Vol [#] [Sub-Title (or printing)] [Other notes]
This is so that
like-to-like sorting happens naturally – all same format hits group
together, in proper alphanumerical order.
What happens a
lot is publishers will put the [subtitle] before the [format] or
the Vol [#] or some combination thereof – almost certainly the ugliest
example of this would be Lone Wolf and Cub where it went
[Title] [subtitle] vol [#], which produced wacky invoices over some
15 or so volumes before it was finally fixed.
Here’s another
example, this is what Marvel’s Dark Tower comics look like
if you search them in an alphabetical display:
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #1 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #2 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #3 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #4 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #5 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #6 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #7 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN 2ND PTG ROMITA JR VAR #3 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN 2ND PTG TAN VAR #4 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN 2ND PTG VAR #1 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN 2ND PTG VAR #2 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN 3RD PTG LEE VAR #2 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN 3RD PTG LEE WRAPAROUND VAR #1 (OF
That whole back
half becomes a big mess. So, instead of…
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN 2ND PTG ROMITA JR VAR #3 (OF 7)
It should
be…
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #3 (OF 7) 2ND PTG ROMITA JR VAR
(and I’d drop the word “VAR” from there, myself, as it is redundant
information at that point)
Thus, the list
would sort like this:
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #1 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER BORN #1 (OF 7) 2ND PTG
VAR
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER BORN #1 (OF 7) 3RD PTG
LEE WRAPAROUND VAR
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #2 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #2 (OF 7) 2ND PTG VAR
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #2 (OF 7) 3RD PTG LEE VAR
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #3 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #3 (OF 7) 2ND PTG ROMITA JR VAR
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #4 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #4 (OF 7) 2ND PTG TAN VAR
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #5 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #6 (OF 7)
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGER
BORN #7 (OF 7)
This is much easier
to read, and to find and understand the specific issue you are looking
for when you are doing a database search.
What is essential to note: this does not necessarily have anything
to do with how the book is presented to the public. It is
perfectly fine if Alan Moore wants his Promethea trades to
say “book one” on the cover. However, in the database provided
to retailers, that should be presented as “VOL 01”
Mmm, the leading zero.
Basically, if
there’s any possible chance that a “series” will go past 9 volumes,
you have to put a leading zero on the title. 01,
02, 03, and so forth. Why, you ask? Because a multivolume
series sorts like this in straight alpha-numeric:
V 1
V 10
V 11
…
V 19
V 2
V 20
V 21
…
V 29
V 3
…and so forth.
But, if you put
a leading zero, then v 01-09 naturally sort before v 10
There’s a lot
of other things that have to be standardized, such as “series codes”,
which allow you to show that “Batman #645” and “Batman #646” are,
in fact, directly related to one another (you use this data to maintain
your pull-and-hold systems) – the use of these at Diamond’s level
is sloppy and often inconsistent, varying wildly from one publisher
to another, There needs to also be an understanding that items that
aren’t “freely order!” (like, say, a 1:10
variant) should not be given the same series code as it’s “parent”
book. If I have 40 people preordering Floozleman (Series
123456), an integrated pull-and-hold system is going to tell me
to order 40 copies of anything that is listed as “Series
123456”. If Floozleman #42 has a 1:10 cover variant, and
is tied to Series 123456, then its going to tell me to order not
only far more copies than I would need, but far more copies than
I could order. In the individual case, not so much a big
deal – I can recognize that I can’t order 40 copies of the Floozleman
1:10 variant, and adjust accordingly – but multiplied against all
of the other variants or whatever differences in each month,
it becomes a major pain in the ass.
Basically, I really
really want to underline the GIGO rule: Garbage-In, Garbage-out.
In most circumstances the data that Diamond provides to the retailer
will become the “default” data for most DM retailers, because Diamond
provides such a significant part of our purchases. To avoid getting
swamped in data entry, we pretty much have to take the data we’re
given “as read”.
I’d also really
(really!) like to see creator information being included
with our weekly invoice downloaded where we’re getting things like
barcode information. Doing a search for a customer for any given
creator’s output should be a trivial matter for the clerk
at your local comics store without the store having to invest the
hours to build that database on their own.
It is much
easier for database solutions like creator information to be created
on the publisher/distributor level – globally, uniformly tell all
accounts that Watchmen is by Alan
Moore and Dave Gibbons, rather than having 3500 individual stores
having to adjust 3500 individual databases. Even the most organized
and anal single store is only likely to have the biggest of the
big names in their individual databases – Moore, Gaiman, Ellis,
and so on – but how many can do a query for, say, a Mike Wieringo?
In a perfect world,
every publisher would be tripping over each other to make sure that
any facet of what they publish can be cleanly and effortlessly searched
– but today, right now, we’re largely limited to searches purely
by title or publisher only – and that’s simply not enough.
The publishers
know who did what on what they publish – they have to in
order to pay royalties and to get those 1099s filled out. Why not
data-dump that information to the retailers to expand our searching
abilities, and to match customer to comic? It just seems like a
no-brainer to me.
Finally, to close
this out, this is now also the time for every publisher to make
sure that their books and comics are all barcoded. Some don’t
like the aesthetics of the barcode. To those people I say “go blow
a goat”, because it is (by and large) not worth the extra delays
at the cash register when you’ve got 4 people standing in line,
all eager to make their purchases, to have to individually query
books from the database to complete a transaction. Barcodes are
a simple fact of life in virtually every industry and entertainment
media that has direct consumer sales, and comics need to
be no exception. Your barcode can be somewhere unobtrusive (inside
front cover, say), or you can even incorporate it as a design element
(though be very very careful to test that it scans properly on a
variety of equipment – not all guns read the same way!), but we’re
now at the point that it can no longer be avoided. Retailers need
an easy, automatable method of tracking inventory, and if you put
up barriers to them doing so, it really is that much easier to drop
your product from the rack in favor of one that does have
a barcode.
Other publishers
will say, “Well, not that big of a deal – not that many people are
using barcodes.” Yeah, except, in 2008 that’s likely to change pretty
dramatically.
Ultimately, we
should be trying to provide, as an industry, better and more accurate
data so that the retailer’s job (and, perhaps more importantly,
the poor staffer on the floor who knows much much less than you
or I do!) is made as easy as it can be in terms of providing what
I’d regard to be fairly basic information in an Information-Driven
society.
I don’t think
that’s too much to ask.
****
Finally, just
because I have a big pile of email which has asked me about it,
ComicsPRO has finally announced the details of the mentoring program. Prospective
new stores now have a forum and a program to address your needs.
Also, video of
the opening remarks of the Las
Vegas meeting can be viewed right here.
**************************
Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix Experience in San Francisco since 1989, and is a founding member of the Board of
Directors of ComicsPRO, the Comics Professional Retailer
Organization. Feel free to e-mail
him with any comments. You can purchase a collection of the
first one hundred Tilting at Windmills (originally serialized
in Comics Retailer magazine) from IDW
Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on Newsarama
can be found right here.
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