Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne asks publishers for improvements to the paperwork sent with shipments and shares his thoughts on Magic: The Gathering’s Universes Beyond.
It is time again, especially with all of the shipments coming in directly from manufacturers and publishers, to plead for shipments to include physical invoices, not just packing slips, in the box rather than solely emailing them. It certainly saves stores a lot of time. Just open the box and start checking in items with all of the necessary information, including price and cost, on the sheet. Even a sheet in the box with a QR code on it to pull up the information would help.
I know most companies email invoices. Unfortunately stores get dozens or hundreds of emails per day and catching an emailed invoice can be tricky, especially with the, shall we say, less than stellar search engines most email providers use with their systems. We try to catch them as they come in and put them in a folder but even then, that folder can quickly accumulate dozens of invoices within a short period of time.
And please, make it an invoice you include in the shipment, not a packing slip. I have lost track of the number of times we open a box, pull out the included paperwork and find it a packing slip, rather than an invoice with all the information we need to process the shipment. If you are going to include paperwork, and I hope you do, please make sure that all the information needed to check in the order, especially for new releases, is on it.
As long as I am asking for things this holiday season, please, when you ship a box of promotional items, include a list of what should be in the box and what you expect us to do with it. We recently received a box of promotional items for promoting the Pokémon trading card game with no indication as to how the company wanted us to use them. Wizards of the Coast still sends stores a marketing kit with each new set of Magic: The Gathering cards, but nothing with the kit to indicate which card should be used for what and that information can be difficult to track down on the Wizards website. Similarly, we ordered a Black Friday promotion from Left Justified and, while the paper invoice had all the information on it we needed to check in the shipment (thank you), there was no mention of the Black Friday promotion included. If another member of the staff had checked in the shipment, they would have had no idea it came in for the promotion.
Meanwhile, sales of Universes Beyond Avatar the Last Airbender and Pokémon Phantasmal Rivals have kept chugging along (I cannot speak as to Riftbound as we missed the first wave but we get a few people in asking for it and other stores, from what I have read, are doing quite well). I have been rather surprised to see the Magic collectors have moved on from Final Fantasy past Spider Man to Avatar: The Last Airbender. We finally got in a restock of Final Fantasy play boosters which have moved comparatively slowly. If they had arrived last summer, the store would have blown through them by now. As it is, my customers are asking for the Chocobo Bundles and pre-ordering Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Comments? Should I give up campaigning for the return of the paper invoice? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
