Client
Comic book retailer and event coordinator
Our client provides a lifestyle around comic books. Both selling and planning events around the exciting stories told by the comic book industry. Hosting comicon events they bring thousands of people together to enjoy the richness that comes from the stories of comics.
Problem
Manual processes lead to higher complexity
The store had been successfully using Facebook as a means to communicate with their customers. However, this process meant that individuals who wanted to reserve comics had to personally reach out to the store owner through Facebook to reserve their books.
This led to:
Time spent organizing and cataloging user responses
Necessity to continually monitor Facebook
Potential missed orders
Task
Design a system to lessen order management time
Most comic book stores aren’t looking to completely replace their current POS system. With that, a unique challenge was that the process of ordering comics for a store was completely dictated by the distributor Diamond comics. This meant that whatever solution was implemented should allow easy integration into their current workflow.
We had to:
Investigate how comic book stores ordered inventory
Learn customer habits
Identify in-store processes and potential bottle necks a solution might have.
Solution
Mobile email ordering and information system
We identified that adding a partially manual ordering process was the best scenario for the store. While a fully automated solution would have saved the most time, the cost with dealing with the third party distributor did not justify the effort.
The ultimate solution that solved all the problems the store currently faced was an email ordering system hosted on a mobile app.
This included:
Ability for users to reserve comics through the app then come to the store for payment/pickup
Upon order submission, compose and send an email order to a specified email address
Showing updated weekly inventory
Showing store events and the store’s Facebook feed
The solution solved the main issues in the following ways:
Email orders can be checked at any time during the day and are filterable, searchable and automatically catalogued.
Emails decrease the chance of a missed order since there is a straight forward method for searching content.
Integration with their current process is seamless and didn’t require training by the staff. The solution integrated on day one of the launch.
Results
Store customers were quick to adopt the new app and gave great feedback. The store brand gained new exposure over the internet with the iOS and Android apps. And the new ordering process gave peace of mind and time back to the owner.
