Executive decisions

We met with a counselor from the Small Business Association in Scottsdale on Thursday and he had some great ideas on things we can do to bring in more business and to serve the community in new ways. I am really excited about some of the possibilities we have ahead of us. So stay tuned for some new and innovative changes in the near future.

As a comic book store owner, however, sometimes you have to make some hard decisions. After a long hard effort to make our webstore successful, we finally had to admit defeat. We were using Intuit’s POS webstore – which interacted with our point of sale system and with our accounting system and paying a hefty $150/month for it. It’s been 15 months now, which means we have paid a total of $2250 in monthly fees, not to mention the initial set up fee of something like $200. That’s enough. A small, family-owned store like us just can’t compete with the Amazons and the folks selling private collections on e-Bay for 80% off cover price and free shipping.

In over a year, we have only had two orders through our webstore, and didn’t really make much of a profit on either one. Thus, the decision to discontinue it.

We are brainstorming ways that we can continue to have some sort of ordering system, even though we don’t have the fancy, integrated POS webstore any more. We do want people to be able to order from us. For now, all I can suggest is emailing us at info@comiczoneaz.com with your requests and we can let you know if we can get them for you, how much it will be, etc. We can always take a credit card payment through paypal or over the phone.

The best part of meeting with the counselor was finding out all of the things we are doing RIGHT as a small business. And there is more to come, so stay tuned….