| | | Hey there waltscomicshop.com customers / fans / lurkers,How was last week? To be exact, last Wednesday evening? You know, that evening where you couldn’t fully access our inventory..? Because we *ahem* accidentally deleted one third of it. But we don't want to get ahead of ourselves, so let's open the history book to page 1. |  | Michael’s original message to Cristian (aka Walt) on Wednesday, 28.11.2022, 18.00 CET | The Worst Case ScenarioTo operate our webshop we use a service provider called SHOPIFY. They are by far the number one for small and midsized businesses. Many of you have repeatedly congratulated us on the good usability, the slick design and the smooth shopping experience of our website. Even if we have a certain share in it, the fact is that Shopify does the lion's share in the background. And we take care of the rest with additional apps (e.g. for pre-orders, wish lists, restock notifications, etc.), limited programming and some more or less "smooth" workarounds. By and large, the whole thing used to work quite well, but it is getting increasingly difficult to handle our ever-growing number of products and some of the special demands of comic book retailing. The biggest challenge is to feed the data of the various suppliers and publishers into our database and to bring everything into a unified form… but I won’t overestimate the interest you take in this DEEP DIVE, so yes, I will get to the point! We do upload, delete and re-upload product data all the time. But we just weren’t fully aware of a certain little box, that, if checked, permanently and irrevocably deletes ALL the product in your shop. No additional warning, no “Are you sure you want to DESTROY YOUR BUSINESS??”, just this one standardised question: |  | |  | … same, but existence-threateningly different. | In one of our trillion data import processes, the little box (OF DEATH) was checked, the slight difference in copy (“all products”) was ignored, and this resulted in an instant deletion of product. Unstoppable, Shopify claimed in the chat (no telephone number available, but we also don’t provide one for our shop, so: fair enough). Also: Not restoreable. Imagine the panic. But for some mysterious reason we got lucky and after ⅓ of our inventory was gone the process stopped. Maybe the algorithm became sentient and was like: WTF is happening here?! Why would they delete so many thousand hours of work, so many updated images, prices, ISBNs, etc, this is just madness!!! Maybe, just maybe, we have witnessed the birth of artificial intelligence and its first act was to stop this act of comic book data destruction. And we were lucky TWICE, because we had two very fresh backups for stock and inventory, one of which was just downloaded a mere hour before the catastrophe. And still, a very long night, morning and noon began… and in the end the recovery process was completed and everything was (almost!) as before. The End. | OK, so what happened to my pre-orders? | In short: nothing. Not to your pre-orders, not to your account data, not to any product data that was uploaded before September ‘22. What was most likely affected though: Wish-list items younger than three months have probably been deleted from your personal wish-list and have to be re-added Restock notifications for products younger than three months are not valid anymore and you’ll have to re-subscribe Some items in your orders are not hyperlinked to product pages anymore, though the products exist in the shop A handful of new products are possibly still missing from the webshop
We are really sorry about this. But all things considered, we think the worst has been avoided. If you happen to come across a product that is no longer listed or notice any other problem, please write to us and let us know. And we vow to stay calm even in the midst of Omnigeddon and not delete any more data, if possible. |  | Previews Pre-Orders have gone live on Sunday | Final order cutoff for this month’s Previews Pre-Orders & single issue Pull-lists customers is early: Friday, 18.12., 23:59h. We are very happy that a book we are constantly asked about comes back into print. It has gone OOP before we set up shop and we will stock it for the first time: The Kill of be Killed Deluxe Hardcover. One of the best Ed Brubaker / Sean Philipps joints. In my book only second to The Fade Out, and I am sure we’ll eventually see that one come back as well. Secondly, IDW has re-offered some of their older Artist Editions through Diamond. Not through PRH though, which is now their main distributor (weird, and also a tad more expensive for us/you). But finally the chance to get our/your hands on some of Eisner’s Spirit in its original glory! Thirdly, Dark Horse is starting a Richard Corben Library. To be clear: It’s not a library EDITION per se, but still a nice looking oversized hardcover, pretty much similar to their Eerie and Creepy hardcovers. If you’re into oldschool Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal and (weird) Fantasy you should check out Corben, an absolute legend. | Free shipping TODAY & pre-Christmas in general | As a little reparation for our data f*ckup, we want to give you a little gift for today: All purchases over 50€ in Germany and 100€ in the EU will be delivered for free*. Maybe the opportunity to fill the free space under the Christmas tree...? *(Germany with DPD, EU with UPS; only instock, no pre-orders, can not be combined with other discount-codes) Just use the code FREETUESDAY (or FREEDIENSTAG in Germany) at checkout. TODAY ONLY! In general we had a lot of orders and things on our hands and have fallen behind on fulfilment during the last two weeks. I apologise for that. By the end of this week, we should have completely closed the gap. And till Christmas we will continue to fulfill same- or next-day! For Germany, Monday 20.12. is the last shipping day on which our shipping service providers (DPD, DHL, UPS) guarantee delivery before Christmas. For the EU, DHL suggests the 15. (14. for France and Italy), UPS and DPD do not provide any information. I guess the earlier the better! |  | Restocks | We got a few less-than-happy emails about stock selling out too fast. I mentioned this a few newsletters ago: With Omnigeddon hitting we needed to cut down on the amount of extras a little. Budget and storage space dictate this. Correctly predicting the demand of certain books at release is of course the JUICE of comics retailing, and while we think we’re mostly doing a fine job at it, a few titles will surprise you. Or the damages you have on them. Or the fact, that you get it one week too early or too late. Many factors play into it. ANYWAY: We will restock everything that we see demand for, so feel free to use the restock notification feature on every article page. Most probably we will restock anyway, especially Big Books and most stuff from MARVEL/DC/DarkHorse/Image/Boom, but it’s still good for you to be notified about it! |  | VIZ/Humanoids/2000AD backstock on its way | We’ll be getting a LARGE palette full of Viz manga, Humanoids Euro-classics and some 2000AD hardcovers next week! Complete or nearly complete runs of One Punch Man, Demon Slayer, My Hero Academia, JoJo’s, Beastars, Asadora, 20th Century Boys, Komi … and lots of volumes from popular franchises like FMA, Jujutsu, Frieren, Snow White with Red Hair etc. I think it’s no secret that VIZ has a hard time keeping some of its most beloved titles in print. Just know that we are committed to re-order and fill up gaps, as soon as restocks are announced. We also use the opportunity to stock up our already lavish Jodorovsky library with a handful more titles, esp. the Metabarons in TP and HC, but also Morrison’s Zenith HCs, some Slaine, Judge Dredd and a few more surprises. Hopefully still in time for the much needed Christmas break. I guess we all are speculating for some cozy reading nights between the years… | Peter David needs your help | One of our favorite Marvel writer of all times, and judging by those Peter David Omni sales probably also one of yours, is dealing with health issues. For us Europeans it’s not easy to wrap our heads around this: A successful career as comic book writer, some of the most beloved runs in modern Marvel history, but the health insurance is still not good enough to cover your problems, when you reach a certain age? Sad. If you want to help Peter and his wife, you can contribute to their gofundme-campaign here. |  | | That’s it! | If you need any kind of support, please get in touch: info@waltscomicshop.com No funny quote to wrap this one up. Just a good, old: Take care of you and your loved ones. And read more comics. (which you have bought at Walt’s) | | | | | |
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