As Diamond Comic’s once-essential services disappear drip by drip, one of the most essential is no more, ComicSuite, a POS (point of sale) system that retailers used to track inventory and monitor sales, is no longer available, not is PllBox, a customer facing pre-ordering system that integrated with it. It comes as no surprise since new owners Sparkle Pop pretty much shut down the support staff on day one. I understand retailers have been moving to other systems, but anyone who was dragging their feet might have problems.
This notice went up on the Diamond retailer site today:
Special Notice Regarding ComicSuite, PREVIEWS Pullbox Availability
| Please be advised that Diamond’s online services are currently being re-evaluated.While we understand the importance of these services to our retailers, we regret to announce that two of them — ComicSuite and PREVIEWS Pullbox — are no longer available. This was posted today on the Diamond retailer website:
ComicSuite Users, Please Note:
Retailers with additional questions regarding this information should contact Diamond’s Retailer Services Department. |
The history of ComicSuite is kind of a history of Diamond in a nutshell. I would have to go back through my yearly reports on the Diamond Retailer Summit, but Tom Spurgeon noted my my first mention of ComicSuite from 2007 and added some notes:
The Major Caveat
Everyone writing in pointed to the service plan as the greatest potential of snafus, while one person pointing to the service plan and their smaller store’s ability to fold in the additional cost or hardware, software and service.
Dustin Harbin: “Diamond has never been impressive on customer service, so hearing that they’re ‘looking to add’ technical support personnel, to meet what will surely be a massive demand, doesn’t fill me with confidence. I fully expect that there will be problems with this initial release, and the $50/hour tech support cost hardly soothes these worries.”
A couple of areas at the end were all Harbin.
My initial report was in an article for Publishers Weekly that is no longer available on their website, but I found it on the Wayback Machine:
Diamond’s new point-of-sale (POS) software may just be the biggest revolution in comics retailing since Marvel editor Carol Kalish helped subsidize comics shops buying cash registers back in the early ‘90s. Or at least that was the word on the floor at the first day of the 2007 Retailer Summit in Baltimore, an annual gathering of comics shop retailers organized by Diamond Comics Distributors, the dominant distributor to comics shops.
Diamond presented its new Comics Suite software at an afternoon seminar. The new system allows comics shops—many of which do not use computerized inventory systems and rely on paper and pencil cycle sheets—to use barcode scanning to automate inventory control, sales and reorder activity.
Store owners surveyed by PWCW were cautiously enthusiastic about the new system—although it is expensive, Diamond is making it affordable for as many shops as possible by offering an 18-month interest-free loan to purchase both the software and hardware, if necessary. It’s an offer that many retailers found tempting. “We’re going to have to give it a very serious look,” said Katie Merritt of Green Brain in Dearborn, Mich., echoing the thoughts of many retailers. While almost everyone is in favor of computerizing sales information, the devil is in the details—the system is expensive, and some shops have problems with the Microsoft software itself.
From a historical standpoint, there’s a lot to unpack here. First, and tangentially, it’s amazing to me that Publishers Weekly’s articles are no longer online, but a website written by a man who died 6 years ago is still available, and the Beat is still online. Second, this article encapsulates the Spurgeon-MacDonald rivalry at its best: I was on the scene to report, but Tom had to get more and better info from his sources to show he knew just as much as me. Rivalry makes everyone better sometimes. God, I miss Tom.
Anyway, that introducing a POS system to comics shops in 2007 was such a revolution is startling in and of itself. I can assure you that most non comics retailers of all sizes were using POS system in 2007. Every time someone scans a barcode and the price rings up on the cash register, they are using a POS system, and you might remember that starting in the 90s or even earlier. Diamond had started developing ComicSuite years before and it took literally years to roll-out: another sign of both Diamond’s antiquated technology and very, very slow moving adaptation to modern retail practices. In this, they mirrored the direct market itself, but you see the feedback loop of non-modernization developing here.
ComicSuite did help a lot of shops, and there are other POS system available now, including Manage Comics and ComicHub. And of course many other systems that are not specifically tailored to comics.
To get back to the present moment, however, now shops that relied on ComicSuite have to find a new solution. More work, more struggles.
The end of ComicSuite puts me in a nostalgic mood. My late Diamond colleague Steve Bates worked on the user manual for ComicSuite, and that was his project for a long time.