QFT #4 - Part 1: Point of Sale systems: Too Sophisticated for your LCS?

On Thursday 12/27/07, Newsarama posted the latest edition of Talking Shop, a column of sorts in which Newsarama compiles the thoughts and opinions of various comic book retailers from across the U.S. and Canada about hot topic of the day facing the retail side of the industry. In this edition, the topic was the use of Point of Sale (POS) systems in comic book stores, specifically the introduction of Diamond’s POS system, customized specifically for the comic book industry (i.e. its customers). You can read the Talking Shop article here.

It’s writing columns about topics such as these where owning a comic book store for a year is going to come in very handy. In fact, I may just rip off the whole Talking Shop idea, and write a rebuttal of sorts each time Newsarama posts a new one. Kinda like the opposite political party always getting its five minutes of fame after a state of the union address. And for the record, I have no illusions that my opinion should be included in Talking Shop. After all, my store is at this point, to put it kindly, less than successful, so my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.

Before we begin, and for those of you who neither read the Newsarama article nor pay attention to the registers at any retail store, let’s define a POS system. A POS system is a combination of computer software and hardware that integrates the cash register, inventory management, and sales data into one system. At the heart of the POS systems is the barcode, or UPC (Universal Product Code). 99.9% of products you buy have one.

The UPC is a unique series of digits assigned to that particular product. In the case of comic books from most “big” companies (DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, IDW), the barcode digits appear in this form:

A LLLLL RRRRR B NNNNN

For the sake of this discussion, characters A and B are not important, so we’ll only discuss the L, R, and N groups. The manufacturer (publisher) is identified by the L-group, and the product (title of the comic book) is identified by the R-group. Incidentally, the A through B range appears on virtually every product be it shampoo, flat screen TVs, or potato chips. In every case, the L-group is the manufacturer and the R-group is the product.

The N-group has unique meaning in the comic book industry. It contains the identification information at the issue level. The first three characters are the issue number (001 for issue #1, 666 for issue #666). The fourth character represents the “cover” for lack of a better term, meaning a 1 represents the standard cover, and 2 and up would represent variant covers, typically with lower print runs – conversely, two covers in a 50/50 print run would utilize the same UPC. The fifth and final character represents the printing (1 for the first printing, 2 for the second, and so on and so forth).

With that data dump, let’s look at a couple of real examples:

Detective Comics #838: 7 61941 20019 4 83811

Detective Comics #838 (2nd printing): 7 61941 20019 4 83812

Supergirl #25: 7 61941 24904 9 02511

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight #10: 7 61568 14111 5 01011

From the barcodes above, we can deduce that 61941 is the manufacturer code for DC, while 61568 is the manufacturer code for Dark Horse. 20019 is the product code for Detective Comics, 24904 is the product code for Supergirl, and 14111 is the product code for Buffy Season 8. Regarding the individual issues, take a look at the two Detective Comics examples. 83811 indicates this is issue #838, standard cover of the first printing, whereas 83812 is issue #838, standard cover of the second printing.

Once you know what to look for, it’s pretty straightforward. Yet there are problems with barcodes on comics. First, there is a governing body for the UPC world and thus manufacturers have to pay for UPCs. As a result, many smaller publishers simply do not use them. As a retailer using a POS system, you can get around a missing UPC by assigning the product a barcode internal to your POS system that can be scanned at the register. Or you can simply enter the title by hand. Either way, the POS system still has a unique entry for that book; the importance of which we will discuss later.

A second problem is some manufacturers will pay for the UPC, but not add the five additional characters for the issue identification. Dynamite is a good example of this practice. Regardless of the issue number, each issue of, let’s say, Highlander, would have the exact same UPC, which the POS system will not allow. To get around this, when we filled in the UPC field in the POS entry, we added “space-issue#” characters. As a result, when you scanned the comic, the system would pull up a list of items with that UPC, and then we would select the specific issue being purchased.

Yet a third problem, but not the last, is the UPC location isn’t standardized from comic to comic. On some, the UPC appears on the front cover, some on the back cover, and others, but much rarer, on inside of the front cover. While the vast majority of UPCs are placed on the front cover, they’ll appear anywhere around the perimeter and in any orientation. This is huge annoyance when you’re processing a large quantity of books during a purchase and you’re forced to flip and spin from book to book to find all the UPCs. Fortunately, DC has all but standardized the UPC location on its books to the bottom-left corner of the front cover. This is yet another reason why DC, in my less than fair and balanced mind, is the best.

In Part 2, I'll discuss what it takes to set up a POS system, its annoyances, and its advantages.