Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne expands on his thoughts on publishers and how they handle packing slips and emailed invoices.
Wizards of the Coast has finally, after at least me asking for over a decade, added a list of contents to its marketing kits for new Magic: The Gathering releases (see “’Lorwyn Eclipsed’ Prerelease“). I saw posts from other stores thanking WotC for adding such a list and saying how helpful it was.
Here’s hoping other publishers and distributors will move back to including paper invoices in their shipments, instead of only sending out emailed copies or including paper packing slips with the order. Here are my problems with both email and packing slips:
Packing slips. The inclusion of a packing slip with any shipment our store receives always leaves me thinking “You were able to include this, why not include a sheet with all of the information I can use?” The typical packing slip comes with a list of the products included in the shipment and how many of each shipped. Often, it also comes with the manufacturer’s item number and how many come in a case.
Unfortunately, packing slips do not come with the cost of the item or the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Listing cost and price is vitally important to retailers, especially in these days of ever-changing tariffs that lead to ever-changing prices.
Our store has seen lots of jumps in prices on Games Workshop products; without something indicating the new price, the staff will have to go to the extra effort of looking for the current pricing on the product. Happily, Games Workshop does include an invoice with most of their shipments which lists the MSRP of items, and we can calculate the cost quickly. We’ve had a number of items in our inventory at one price before; the restocks arrived with a MRSP increase of $20 to $30 (a pretty healthy jump).
In short, if you are going to the trouble of including a packing list, please go the extra step and print out the invoice and include it.
Emailed Invoices. Generally, when a company includes a packing slip, we also receive an emailed invoice. These are problematic as well, since stores have to make sure they catch them as they arrive. We are a small store in comparison to others and still get 300 to 400 emails a day. Invoices can get overlooked in the flood of emails arriving daily and, should the store miss one, it has go search either through its inbox, spam folder or trash file.
Publishers and distributors would make stores’ lives much easier by including a printed invoice with shipments, along with emailed ones if the system is set up that way.
Please, include invoices with all shipments. It will speed up things on the retail end markedly. I ran across an interesting piece of German research on the impact the tariffs have on U.S. prices and will get into that in the next column.
Comments? Does your store deal seamlessly with emailed invoices and packing slips? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
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