We live in a chaotic world of many publishers and many distributors. Comic Shop Assistant is designed with tools to help you manage this.

Setting your preferred publishers does three things. One is cosmetic and helps coach you through orders. The other three limit what happens when you press a button.

1) If you prefer to place your Marvel orders with PRH instead of Diamond, you can set PRH as your preferred Marvel distributor. When you're in a PRH order (custom, initial or FOC), Marvel items will be flagged with a green color, telling you that this is the distributor you like to order the from. In a Diamond order, the same items would be flagged in yellow, letting you know that you prefer to order them somewhere else.

2) When using the AUTOFILL UP TO SUGGESTED QUANTITIES button in your FOC or Initial Order ORDER ACTIONS, order quantities for items that prefer a different distributor are not adjusted.

3) Within a Custom Order, navigating to ORDER ACTIONS to gather your minimum points will give you the option to gather minimum points only for publishers you've assigned as preferring this order's distributor.

 

NOTE: Currently, preferred distributors are set on a publisher level, so if you like to order your periodicals from one distributor and your books from another, you'll need to edit the preferred publishers between those categories. This was a bad decision early on in the framework for this feature, and will be updated to be more fleixble in the future.

 

To manage your preferred distributors, navigate to ITEMS > MANAGE PUBLISHERS. This interface will let you consolidate publisher names into one main name to use throughout the site (you probably have Marvel PRH, as well as Marvel Comics both set as publishers because of different data feeds from distributors). You can also assign a preferred distributor for the main name you select, as well as a contact for the publisher.

Let's use DC as an example.

  1. On the MANAGE PUBLISHERS page, search for DC.
  2. Decide which of the various names you want to appear around the site when a DC comic is displayed. In this example, we want DC COMICS to be the main name.
  3. On the DC COMICS line, change the TREATED AS drop menu to THIS IS THE MAIN NAME.
  4. On all other relevant DC lines, change the TREATED AS drop menu to DC COMICS.
  5. Reload the page, and you'll see that you can now assign LUNAR as the preferred distributor, and put a contact ID in the field for publisher contact (optional and un-used right now).

Here's a video of Jeff and Django talking about how Preferred Distributors work...