Case Study: Online Comic Book Retailing

Case Study: Online Comic Book Retailing

Case Study: Online Comic Book Retailing

Much like a lot of retail businesses the sale of comic books and related items has both grown and moved from the brick and mortar shops to online. In some cases this is to expand their customer base. In others it is a way to reach customers without the overhead of a physical shop, which carries various levels over overhead. My case study will look at three businesses, Mile High Comics, (milehighcomics.com) Midtown Comics, (midtowncomics.com) and My Comic Shop .com (mycomicshop.com). These three shops have different backgrounds and different levels of web presence. I’ll consider each to these things in the case study of online comic book retailing.

I chose online comic book retailing as its something that I have familiarity with. Once upon a time I was a manager at a brick and mortar shop in St. Louis, Missouri. The Comic shop that I worked at was a family owned business and had been around for 20 years. The time away near the end of the 90’s and we were beginning to see a decline in sales Like many comic book retailers. You see in the early 90’s the comic book industry saw a boost in sales. Young readers were picking up comics for the first time. Many were getting into comics for the first time many were returning. A big reason for this is was that the large publishers, DC Comics and Marvel, were making efforts to bring new readers in different ways. One of these ways was to begin making collectable comics, using gimmicks like limited print runs, multiple covers, and publisher crossovers. That’s not to say that comics of the 90’s were all flash and no substance, another driving force was great writing, art and fantastic characters. It was because of all of these things that comic books gave birth to a new type of collector, the speculator.

The speculator would go into comic shops and pay lots of money for comics that they felt were going to quickly grow in value so that they could be sold for a nice return. It was a lot like the Day Trading days of the early 2000’s with the stock market. Unfortunately for many speculators this didn’t work with comics that well, this can be blamed on several things, over saturation of the market with comics that were intentionally marketed at speculators and not understanding the market were the biggest. At first the speculators were bringing great deals of money into the shops, but as time grew on and they saw they were losing money most of the time they stopped coming into he shops. That is not to say that they all stopped many of them began reading and collecting the comics for the art and stories and this continued, though many stopped. This made many retailers begin to look at ways that they can expand their customer base. At this point in the history of the internet amazon.com and