Announcing the New More Fun Comics and Games Online Store!

Hi everyone! Long time no talk, at least in this space. Not much going on over here, how about you?
Ok but really, it’s been a chaotic few years, to say the least. The new changes that have come in the comic, game, and hobby biz are unlike anything I have seen since the distributor wars of the early 90’s. Distribution is again shattered, demands have shifted seemingly weekly, oh and there was a little pandemic too. If you’re interested in the behind the scenes stuff, my friend Brian Hibbs has been writing about it in his Tilting at Windmills column over at The Beat. No sense in just retyping what he has already exhaustively cataloged.

What I’m here to talk about today is the new More Fun Comics and Games online store! You can click the shop online button up in the top right of this page to get to it, or go directly to the link https://more-fun-comics-and-games.myshopify.com/ and bookmark it yourself! We expect to launch the site on March 1st to the public and is currently password protected, but first we’re going to do a few posts here to introduce the site as we continue to beta test behind the scenes. But why now, why today, and why haven’t we done this before? Read on!

Why haven’t you done this before now?
When the pandemic set in during March of 2020, we attempted to launch an online store front. It did not go well, some of you may remember. Our point of sale at the time was not designed to integrate with online services. The data in our database was a mess, with tons of items showing in stock that were not, plus many items had poor information. As things started to slowly reopen in the summer of 2020, we were absolutely overwhelmed with business, thanks to all of you! Turns out when people are still mostly unable to travel or go to large gatherings, they were looking for things to do at home, and it was incredibly challenging to keep up. We sealed up the online store and focused on navigating the chaos as well as getting More Fun Toys! off the ground. So getting things online took a back seat to just trying to keep up.

So why now?
In the summer of 2023, we rolled out a new point of sale that actually can integrate with the online service, Shopify. We spent months cleaning up the database. The initial integration took about eight weeks, and then work began on the graphical layout and tweaking the products so things were at least close to ready. We’ve been doing some beta testing, and while there will almost be more bumps in the road, I’m confident it it good enough to get most of what we want out of the site!

Enough preamble, what is on the site?
Our inventory in real time! Want to know if we have something in stock? You can just go search for it on the site. If it is there odds are 99% we have it in store and ready to pick up!
Weekly comic preorders! Every week at about 1pm Friday afternoon we’ll have all of the weekly offerings from the comic publishers up for you to peruse and place special orders. You won’t need to order anything for titles you already have in your monthly pull, but if you want an alternate cover, a one shot, or a mini series, this is a great way to make sure you lock those in for your collection.
Gaming preorders! We’ll have a whole section of game preorders for trading card games, tabletop games, RPGs, and, even more exciting, Kickstarter projects! We do lots of game Kickstarters, and now you’ll be able to order ones we back direct from us, and we expect to have some sweet deals available.
Weekly new releases! We’ll also have sections of the newest releases for you to dig through and discover new items you may not have known about.

Great! How do I do all these preorders?
That’s worth another post or two on its own. We’ll post those details this coming Monday in a new blog post here.

Anything else important I need to know?
The most important thing is that for the time being we will only have sales for pickup, no delivery or shipping. We’re working on that, but setting up shipping costs across the wide variety of items we sell is a whole project on its own.

That’s it for today, thanks for reading! It’s been a while and I look forward to communicating here more and your feedback on the site! You can always e-mail me directly at morefuncomicsandgames@gmail.com with any issues, bugs, questions, or ideas. Feedback helps me come up with what to write about here next, so don’t hesitate to reach out!

Tim Stoltzfus
Owner, More Fun Comics and Games