Category Archives: news

Some time ago we decided the front page of our comic site needed an update, so we started testing four or five different versions to see what worked best for our users. Every user was assigned a random front page, and we listened to feedback and looked at how users interacted with each page. We collected a lot of data. We waited. For a really long time. We’ve finally picked the winner:

All of them!

If you surf on over to the main page you’ll see some new buttony looking things across the top of the page. Browse Comics takes you to a slightly updated version of what was our original page. Shipping This Week lets you know what’s shipping, and lets you browse the list by sales rank, author, artist, publisher, etc. Recent Happenings gives you a dashboard to see what’s going on at HeavyInk: what people are subcsribing to, posting in the forum, blogging about, etc etc etc. Finally, Browse Graphic Novels lets you see what’s going on in the world of Graphic Novels.

Do you like one of these more than the others? Scroll to the bottom of the page, and if the page isn’t already set as your default you’ll see a button that says “Make This Your Default View”. Then, every time you go to Heavy Ink’s front page you’ll get your default page.

Oh, and as a lil’ bonus we’ve added a new page that provides a more useful listing of all the comic book publishers we carry.

Thanks for waiting so patiently for the refresh, and please let us know what you think!

A few weeks ago we announced that we’re making some changes to shipping. We’re replacing free shipping 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).

We got lots of feedback, and the biggest question was “Can I have the option to schedule my comics to ship less frequently?”. We’ve been spending the last few weeks implementing that feature, along with some other goodies. This week will be the first week with our shipping changes, and we’ve released our new features today so you have some time to make adjustments before we ship on Wednesday. Here’s how it works:

If you visit your shipping preference page

http://heavyink.com/shipping

you’ll see options to change your shipping preferences, including options to schedule your shipments. Once you’ve picked the schedule you’d like, you can check out your personal shipping calendar

http://heavyink.com/me/account/calendar

to see what will ship when. The calendar uses release dates to provide shipping estimates, and we know that comics don’t always ship on time, but we’ll try to keep the calendar as accurate as we can.

Sometimes you’ll notice that there are comics in the calendar that could ship right away, but we’re holding them until your next scheduled shipment. If you want these comics sooner, you can click the “Ship Stuff Sooner” button. If you do that, we’ll ship you everything on your list that’s in stock the next time we ship. We’ll go back to your regular schedule after that one shipment.

That’s it! These are new features, so we want to hear from you if you see any problems or bugs. Our goal is to make your comics experience sweet and simple, we hope we’re on the right track.

Sincerely, The HeavyInk Team

Travis, Pete, Dan, Susan, and Andy

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