How Subscription Software Can Give Your Store An Advantage
Using the right software can help your comic book store become more modern and user friendly. Read on to learn how SaaS comic book software gives your store an advantage.
Comic book sales enjoyed steady growth in recent years.
In fact, July 2016 saw sales figures reaching heights not seen since the 90’s comics boom! 2017 wasn’t nearly as rosy a year, but there’s good hope that 2018 could be different, already this year Black Panther is the highest grossing superhero film of all time, and the year is chock full of high profile comic book inspired films.
Something else has also seen growing popularity — software-as-a-service.
If you aren’t familiar with it, software-as-a-service (SaaS) refers to software hosted on vendors’ servers that you can access online. Adobe’s Creative Cloud is a good example. More important for you, though, is that SaaS comic book software can give your store a major advantage.
Here’s how:
Customer Satisfaction
Customers expect 24/7 access to all of their accounts, yet comic stores often lag in this area. SaaS comic software can change that!
The right software will give your customers access to their accounts, their purchase histories, and even give them some control over future orders. Not to mention letting customers find out whether their orders are in that week.
Reduce Your Comic Book Software IT Workload
As a business owner, your time is valuable. The question is whether that time is best spent on managing the business or managing IT.
All locally installed software needs periodic maintenance in terms of upgrades, configuration, and security checks. SaaS applications come with none of those problems.
You or the vendor can configure the software to your preferences. And all the ongoing maintenance becomes the vendor’s problem after that.
This leaves you free to redirect your time and energy toward core business activities, like catching up on the new books from the latest DC reboot.
Improved Revenue
Any decent comic book software will give customers the option to search through your current stock. This increases the chances they’ll find something new to try, which helps your bottom line. It also gives them an opportunity to fill gaps in their collection from your existing inventory.
An especially good piece of software will integrate payment features that let your customers settle up for their orders before they come to the store. This also gives busy customers the chance to buy now and pick up when it’s convenient, even if convenient is three weeks from now.
Data Protection
No one expects it, but disasters happen.
What would you do if a freak electrical surge or fire destroyed your in-house computers or servers? Do you have backups of your databases? Are your backups up to date?
SaaS comic book software solves these problems for you. Not only will your databases be current, they’ll be secured on off-site servers. So even a catastrophe that destroys your store won’t destroy your data.
That leaves you armed with everything you need to get the ball rolling as soon as you relocate or rebuild.
With comics all over the media, the time is right to modernize your software to meet customer expectations. SaaS software can do exactly that for you.
NorthIQ’s SaaS offering, Manage Comics, is designed for comic bookstores and their customers. To see what Manage Comics can do for you, watch our webinar.
