Where are my comic books? That is a question I’ve heard many, many times! This article will hopefully give you an idea of what we have to do at GrahamCrackers.com to get your comics shipped to you! While most orders go out relatively quickly – there’s always a chance for a delay, here are the six main steps we do when we ship out an order.
1) Print the orders for the day
2) Pull the orders
3) Build the orders
4) Re-Process the orders (bag & board)
5) Pack the orders
6) Ship the orders.
Each step has other steps involved, but if I were to list them this article would become far too long.
Printing the orders is an easy step. We go into the order system and print out daily orders. We print out orders Monday through Saturday. If you placed an order on a Monday afternoon, it won’t be printed until Tuesday. We only print the orders out once per day.
Pulling the orders is where we take the pull slip, which has bin locations for us to go to to pull the book. Each section has hundreds of bins/boxes. Depending on the volume of books ordered in the past 24 hours dictates how long the massive pull list can become. We take the pull slip, go to the assigned bins, and pull the book you ordered. Now there are times when the book won’t be there, or it’s damaged. That’s where I step in and “bloodhound” the book. I’ll search the inventory system to see if there’s another copy. If all searching is exhausted, the book goes on the special-order list to see if another store has a copy. If another store has it, we get those on the following Tuesday. When it’s a newer book from a distributor it can take 2 weeks or more to receive a replacement copy!
Building the orders is just matching up the books on the pull slip with the individual packing slips of each customer’s order.
Processing the orders involves putting the books into nice new bags and boards (the same ones we sell!) plus double-checking the quality of the books. There are lots of variants: Regular cover, foil, virgin, sketch, it’s insane! If any books are discovered to be damaged, we search for another copy, or they go on the special-order list.
Packing the orders is where we check off book by book to make sure you have the correct book and cover. With some comics having upwards of 30 different variations on the same issue, this is where it’s easy for a mistake to be made. Is everything all good? Then we initial the receipt and package up the books for safe shipping.
Lastly, your order moves to the postage section – where your address is double-checked against where you requested you wanted it sent and confirmed that it’s a valid shipping address. At long last, the postage is printed out and the package awaits the Post Office/UPS/Fedex to pick up.
So that’s roughly what we do to get your books to you. I could have gone into even more tedious detail, but you’d get bored. So next time you ask “Where are my comic books?” Try to picture a guy running around with a limp saying “More missing books?”