When you sell a book, two things get recorded: the order, and who bought it. Keeping the buyer separate from the sale is what lets you see that the person who bought from you on eBay in March is the same one who bought at a show in June.
These are sales. If you run a pull list service, the Subscribers and Distributor Order tabs in Pull Boxes are something else: the regulars you hold books for, and what to order from your distributor. See Pull Boxes.
Where orders come from
- A connected marketplace. Sales sync in and are matched to the inventory item you listed.
- A checkout link. If you have payments set up, you can send someone a link for a specific item and they pay by card.
- A claim sale. When a buyer pays their pay link, or you mark them paid another way, the order is recorded for every book they claimed. See claim sales.
- A sale you log yourself. Shows, Instagram, a friend. You record what sold and for how much.
- A point of sale import. A sales CSV from your till.
Filter by where it sold
The row of filters above the list has one for every marketplace you have connected or sold on, each with its order count, plus Claim sales. Click one to see only those orders. All clears it. An order from a claim sale shows the platform it ran on and a Claim sale tag.
What happens to the order
Orders move through a small set of states:
- Paid: money received, nothing shipped.
- Fulfilled: you have sent it, with tracking if you bought a label.
- Delivered: it arrived.
- Refunded or cancelled: it did not complete.
Marking an order fulfilled after buying a shipping label carries the tracking number across, so you are not copying it by hand. See shipping labels.
Selling an item marks the underlying comic as sold in your inventory, and the profit or loss appears against it. How that number is worked out is covered in pricing.
Customers
A customer record is built from whatever the sale carried: a name, an email, a marketplace handle. Each channel gets recorded against the same person where we can tell it is them.
We match on strong signals, mostly email. We do not guess from a similar name, because merging two real people is worse than leaving two records.
Merge review
When two records look like the same person but we are not certain, they go to Customers → Merges for you to decide. Merging moves every order onto one record and keeps both sets of contact details. Merges cannot be undone, so the review step exists on purpose.
Gotchas
- A logged sale is not a payment. Recording a show sale tracks the money, it does not collect it. Only checkout links, claim sale pay links, and connected marketplaces move funds.
- Some channels give you almost nothing. A cash sale at a show has no email, so it cannot be linked to a buyer later. Add an email at the time if you want the history.
- Refunds do not un-sell the comic. If a sale falls through and you still have the book, put it back to in stock yourself.
- Orders and Customers only appear once your workspace can take payments. Before that the nav hides them.