It's been a while since we posted on our blog. This is what we've been up to in the past month:
New publishers
Besides keeping our catalog up to date with the products from Great Eastern Animation, Bioworld, Viz, Kodansha, Vertical Inc, Funko and others, we added boardgames from USAopoly and manga's from Seven Seas.
USAopoly makes classic boardgames like Monopoly, Munchkin, Yahtzee, Risk but gives them a "twist" by styling them in a Super Mario, Hobbit, Zelda, Walking Dead or other fun theme. My Little Pony Monopoly anyone?
Seven Seas is the publisher of several popular manga series like Alice in the Country of, Centaur's Life, A Certain Scientific Railgun, D-Frag, Dance in the Vampire Bund and many more. Our catalog now has 3684 manga's for sale and 13,135 products in total.
Social media
If you follow us, you know Archonia.US is a brand new US version of the popular webshop Archonia.com in Belgium (yeah, that's in Europe). Archonia.com already exists for over 15 years and they are very familiar with the European fans and communities. We as Archonia.US are still figuring out how to approach American fans. We can already say that American fans are very different from European fans!
We recently opened a Pinterest account and are trying to fill our boards with funny and interesting pins. Let us know what you think!
Website improvements
We updated our homepage to show some more activity. It now shows our Recently added (in-stock) products and Recently stocked products overall. At the moment we still limit ourselves in selling only in-stock products until we have a better grip on backorder and preorder delivery dates. Last thing we want to do is promise you to fill a backorder or preorder at a certain date and failing because our release dates are not exact enough or our suppliers aren't able to tell us with a high degree of certainty when they will deliver. Getting this right takes a lot of "behind the scenes" workflow which we are busy with right now.
We also changed our checkout flow regarding payments. Initially we allowed you to add your card to your order (stored securely by our payment provider Braintree) so we could charge it a few hours later when we were 100% certain we could deliver your complete order. However, this apparently doesn't work for some prepaid and gift cards (there is a technical explanation but I'm not going to bore you with that). Long story short, we now have an extra option for prepaid and gift cards. Selecting this option allows you to make a payment after we have confirmed we are ready to ship your order.
What's next?
Next in line for expanding our catalog is Dark Horse. Additionally we'd like to add novels from Viz, Seven Seas, and the other manga publishers. And Funko …, well Funko seems never-ending.
Regarding the website, we plan to add some more basic functions which we left out in the initial version (password reset, delivery tracking details on order page, edit account settings, etc.). We also plan to make the checkout process smoother for first-time users. On the backoffice side (= what happens behind the scenes), we are working on improving our out-of-stock availability information so we can start offering backorders and preorders.
That's it for now. See you next time!
