Pull Boxes is for retailers. It collects the pull lists of every customer who has connected to your shop, so you can see what to pull this week and what to order, without keeping it on paper. It has three tabs: Subscribers, This Week and Distributor Order.
Pull Boxes needs the Shop plan. Claiming a shop profile is free, so you can see who is waiting for you before you decide to pay.
Getting your shop set up
There are two ways in.
- A customer invited you. Open their link, create an account, and claim the shop. Any customers who already added your shop appear immediately.
- You are starting from scratch. Open Pull Boxes, create your shop and share your details so customers can find you.
Subscribers
These are the regulars who want new issues held for them. They are not the same list as Customers in the main menu, which is everyone who has bought from you on any channel.
A customer connects to you from their side. Requests arrive as pending until you approve them. You can add private notes to a customer record, pause someone who is travelling, or remove them. Notes are yours; the customer does not see them.
Until your first customer joins, this page shows an invite link. Copy it and send it. It opens Stash with your shop already found, so the customer only has to send the request. They need to be signed in for the link to land in the right place.
This Week
This is the working screen. Pick a week and you get every release your customers expect, grouped so you can work down the list. Each one moves through three states:
- Pulled: you have set it aside.
- Available: it is ready, and the customer is told.
- Skipped: you could not get it, or they passed.
Distributor Order
This is what to order from your distributor, not a record of sales. Sales live under Orders in the main menu.
It answers the only question that matters when you place an order: across all customers, how many copies of each book do I need. It totals the same week’s releases into one list per title.
You can export that list in three shapes:
- Diamond order form CSV
- Lunar and PRH spreadsheet layout
- A generic CSV with title, issue, publisher, UPC and quantity
Printing
Pull sheets print per customer or per week. Print at 100% with scaling turned off. See browsers and devices if the output looks wrong.
Connecting your own systems
If you run a point of sale or inventory system, the shop API lets it read customer lists and releases and write status changes back. You generate a key on the API tab, and it is shown once. Webhooks can push events to you as they happen rather than you polling for them.
Gotchas
- Customers own their lists. You can mark releases and add notes, but you cannot edit what somebody has asked for. That is deliberate.
- Releases come from your customers. There is no automatic feed of upcoming issues, so This Week reflects what has been entered.
- Marking something available notifies the customer. Use pulled while it is still on your shelf.
- An API key is shown once. If you lose it, generate a new one, which immediately stops the old one working.