Looking at a New POS System

My current POS system is just that, a Piece of Shit. Comtrac. Supposedly the industry leader in comic book store POS systems. Sadly, they were never able to get me what I ordered and paid for. They started me out on a DOS version while the Windows version was in beta testing. This was in 2006. Windows has been around for a few years before this, right? This should have been a sign, but I was young and didn't know better. So I limped along my first year and a half on the decrepit DOS version. Sadly, when DOS was out, I was using my Apple IIe, so I didn't know the fancy lingo to get it to do stuff. Like working without a mouse. How quaint.

But the promises of the new system doing what I expected and being right around the corner kept me going. Well, finally in December 2007 I got the Windows program and had it all installed and ready to go for January. And it worked OK in January. Lots of bugs and things that were quite annoying, but, hey, I finally had it.

Well, that was great until about 2 days into February, when it had a fatal error. Contacted the company and many downloads and patches later I was told, by the IT guy who was looking at my monitor that I could not be getting the error message that was coming up. I pointed out to him that it was right there, but since it couldn't be happening, there was nothing he could do.

So, I went back to the DOS version and have been limping along on 1982 technology since. The day I was told that the system I paid $2000 for won't work anymore, I signed up for Diamond Comic Distributor's fancy new POS program based on Microsoft RMS. This kind of made me happy only because Diamond is the main company that I deal with for product and Microsoft hopefully has support people who won't tell me that there is nothing they can do to help me. Everything seemed like a good fit.

Except I have now been waiting 49 weeks for the product. I'm not greedy. I know they said it would be a slow roll out to make sure that everything was working properly. But, there are only about 3000 stores in the country. And I doubt all of them are getting the product. Maybe 10%. I certainly should have had it by now. Getting impatient. I really would have liked to have had the new system to start the year so that everything would have been in one place. But then again, that didn't work so well last time.

So, on a comic retailer forum, there was a discussion about doing the monthly order. The conversation quickly turned to how does your POS system help you do this. (Mine does not, in case you were wondering. They didn't do monthly orders back in the 40s when my system was created). And people who have this other system, called Moby , are giving their product rave reviews. I had poked around at this a while back, but was holding out for the Microsoft system due to support issues. But some of the people who have gotten the new Diamond system are commenting that it doesn't work as efficiently as they had hoped. Moby was designed by store owners for making things easier. RMS is a generic program that is being modified for comic books stores, but apparently is not a flexible as it could be and the stores have to adapt to it instead of the other way around.

So I ask a couple people I know who have it and the reviews are glowing. So I am probably going to go with it. I am going to talk to the Ben at Bitter End on Thursday and make sure I am ready for it and then we'll go forward.

I will keep you updated.