SALES TO ASTONISH #23 - JULY 2024

I was wrong!

Although the sun hardly broke through the clouds for the early part of July, the march of England’s football team to the final of the Euros and their ultimate heroic defeat, did affect sales the longer they remained in the competition. A general downturn in sales, especially on and just after match days culminated in an almost perfect storm on 14th July. Never for a moment expecting England to reach the finals, I had booked myself a table to Banbury Comic Con, and based on my success at Market Harborough Comic Con in late June I was anticipating great things. On arrival layout of the venue seemed different to other events and I realised that there weren’t as many dealer tables as usual. By the time I had set up it was also evident that there wasn’t a large queue outside the door either. How much the football later in the day affected the turn out I’ll never know, but aside from selling some Bronze Age Claremont & Byrne X-Men comics, a few sets and a bunch of 50p cheapies it was very quiet. A sentiment echoed by other dealers around me. Online sales were negligible too and the perfect storm arrived with England losing the final. A day to write off and move on. I’d won some comics at an auction so picking them up the following day helped sugar coat the pill 😂😂

One of the continual challenges that I face on a daily basis is how do I turn a casual browser into a buyer? I realise that this is a six million dollar question for most retail businesses but I’ve pondered this often over the last six months. My online traffic has increased year on year and I now have over 2000 subscribers to my weekly emailers, but the number of sales I make monthly hovers around the same amount each month. I don’t want my approach to running the Unreality Store to be too data driven as I think I could well end up down a rabbit hole looking at Google Analytics, Shopify Reports, Facebook and Twitter data etc etc but the third weekly release in July stood out for the fact that

1. It was my lowest email open rate for over a year
2. Web traffic for a Thursday was significantly down on previous Thursday release days
3. I had the fewest interactions on social media I had had for months - Instagram views and likes seem to have dwindled to a couple per post
4. I sold pretty much all of the Justice League of America issues but nothing else during the day
5. I have repeated visits according to IP locations from places like Silverstone (UK) and Ashburn (USA) but have never ever sold anything to those addresses.
6. My sales seem very focused on the weekly releases and not on the thousands of historic items already in stock

At that point July was looking bang average to say the least. But fate is a fickle mistress and my decision to run with a nice stack of mid-grade Bronze Age House of Secrets & House of Mystery the following week more than paid dividends. I never really knew these books had such a following but looking at some of the covers and interior art I can see why, and copies in FN from the early to mid-70’s flew out at around £10 per comic. I’d definitely look to purchase collections of these in future.

Another thing I am acutely aware of is that I generally only hold one copy of a particular issue and once that has sold, that’s it until I pick it up another in a collection. Whilst this is good in creating FOMO, the flip side is that unlike comic book shops that are able to sell multiple copies of the same issue or graphic novel, I can only do it once meaning there’s a possibility that I miss out on sales, and generally what I don’t see is people missing out on something from the Thursday/Saturday releases and turning to the older stock to see if anything takes their fancy. This is yet another part of the sales conundrum that I need to solve 🤔🤔

If you’ve got this far you are probably wondering why Superman’s pal featured in the title of this months instalment. Well at the end of July I dropped around 15 issues of Silver & Bronze Age Jimmy Olsen comics in the store. Within minutes the Kirby issues (including 134 which has a cameo of Darkseid appearing on a monitor screen looking nothing like the Darkseid we know today) went and the Silver Age issues followed a couple of days later. I had no idea a jobbing reporter from

The Daily Planet was so popular!

And that’s the joy of selling comics - there’s always something to surprise and entertain you 😎😎

See you next month 🤟