Here's the thing... it's 2025. Selling comics has always been a rough business, but you absolutely cannot keep going deeper into the 21st century without a quick and accurate point of sale system to keep track of orders, invoices, deliveries, and all the other mundane crap that has to be taken care of in a shop. As a business owner, you don't have time to deal with all that personally and you can't afford to pay even the most meager of salaries to someone to do that manually. It essentially has to be run electronically.
Comic Knowledge is hardly the first such system, but this one is coming at a critical time. With Diamond falling apart, and publishers now going through a variety of different distributors, managing orders is suddenly immensely more challenging. For all the problems Diamond had before, its monopoly status at least meant that everything was in one place for the retailer. Now they've got to deal with different ordering processes and systems, and while, yes, you could probably set up a spreadsheet to handle things, that would become wildly inefficient after only a few months. You can technically put an veritable infinite number of sheets in a single Excel document, the app was never really designed for that volume of data. Having a single system like Comic Knowledge seems to be presenting will absolutely cut down on the amount of organization and work a retailer will need to perform just to keep up with the barest minimum of doing their job.
Add into this the payment processing -- until now, it's always been a completely separate setup almost entirely divorced from the actual sales -- and the possibility of having customers quickly and easily add/drop to their pull lists? That seems like a retailer's dreams! (It shouldn't be. This all should've been in place decades ago, but here we are.)
Clearly, there's going to be some upfront costs involved. Even if the hardware is offerred for free, just learning a new system is going to take time and will no doubt have many glitches and errors as it starts to roll out. Just because of... you know, technology... it's going to start getting installed in the field and we're going to hear a round of issues that retailers are having with it. But as they get accustomed to this new system, I expect it will make their businesses MUCH more manageable (and ideally more profitable!) in the long run.
This might sound like a boring, business-y nothing burger to your average comics reader, but if this does even half of what they're saying, it will be a game-changer for any retailer who starts using it!
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