Monthly Archives: January 2009

After listening to your feedback about our upcoming shipping changes, we sent all our customers this followup email:

About a week ago we announced that we’d be making some changes to our shipping prices. Here’s a quick recap: free shipping is being replaced with “cheap shipping” - only 99 cents per shipment - and we’re replacing the expensive UPS option with the less expensive Priority Mail option - only $2.99 per shipment.

Our customers (that’s you) replied via email and in the forum. Nearly everyone who responded asked for one basic feature: “Can I have the option to schedule my comics to ship less frequently?”

Yes, absolutely! We think this is a really reasonable request, so we’re going to implement it along with the planned changes to shipping prices.

There were a lot of good ideas on how this feature should work, and some requests for additional features to make it work even better. So, after some thought, here’s what we’re planning on:

You’ll be able to choose from the current “ship my subscriptions weekly” option as well as two new options: “ship every two weeks” and “ship every month”.

If you care more about how many comics come in a shipment instead of how often we ship, you’ll also be able to ask us to wait to ship stuff until 2, 4, 6, 8, or 10 items are ready to go. Because we have limited space on our shipping floor we’ll automatically ship stuff every two months, even if you haven’t reached your chosen threshold.

So that you can keep track of what’s ready and waiting to ship, we’ll be providing you with a personalized “shipping calendar”, showing what’s already in stock, what’s coming soon, and when we expect to send your next shipment.

Because sometimes it might be worth paying a little extra for that one issue you’ve really been waiting for, the calendar page will have a “ship my stuff sooner” button if you want to forget about the schedule now and then.

That’s it! We hope you’ll like these new features.

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone for the response to the previous email. We announced a pretty drastic change to our shipping policies, and we got lots of understanding, positive feedback, and great feature suggestions. Even people who are leaving because of the change responded with grace and civility. That’s not always common these days, and we appreciate it.

Sincerely, The HeavyInk Team Travis, Pete, Dan, Andrew, Susan, and Andy

This email was sent out to all our customers about a week ago:

It’s hard to believe we’ve been in business for over a year! Over that time we’ve grown a lot and learned a lot, and the world has changed a bit around us. When we first started we were able to offer free shipping to everyone and still make ends meet. Since then there have been postage increases, higher packaging costs, rent increases, and so on. So, we need to make some small changes. We’ll be rolling these changes out in a few weeks, and we wanted to give you some notice ahead of time.

First, instead of free shipping, we’re going to offer cheap shipping. Only 99 cents a shipment, no matter how large or small. That’s still a lot less than we actually pay to ship you your comics, but this small change will help us a lot.

Also, we love our Canadian customers too, but shipping to Canada costs a bundle. We still plan to charge a lot less than we actually pay: only $2.49 per shipment. We know that’s a bigger jump than for shipping to the US, we hope you’ll understand why we need to do it.

Finally, we’ve listened to your feedback, and we realize that our current UPS shipping option isn’t exactly what people want as a premium shipping option. At $3.99, it winds up a bit too expensive for most people to use. So, we’re planning to replace our UPS shipping option with a new Priority Mail option, at only $2.99. It’s less expensive, and should arrive at your doors even faster than UPS does. Win!

We’ll be rolling out these changes in a few weeks, so if you want to take advantage of our free shipping while it’s still available, you’ve got some time.

Thanks for reading, and for shopping at HeavyInk. We know there are a lot of places to buy comics, thanks for helping HeavyInk succeed!

Sincerely, The HeavyInk Team Travis, Pete, Dan, Andrew, Susan, and Andy