Weekly Store Update: 24 April

Things have changed recently though. Instead of the box and six pack method, Fantasy Flight has started two boxes that do the same thing, one with the people and another with the adventure. In this way customers have a much better chance to complete their story arcs. 

As a consumer, I really like the new concept! However, the immediate problem for us as retailers is most customers are transitioning or have transitioned to the new 'two box' releases and the original cards have gone idle. So, we've decided to put almost all of the old box / card packs on a significant 50% off or greater sale. The only packs that won't be on sale are the 'big packs' that hold a single adventure and the newer individual character packs. As far as we know, those aren't being reprinted into the bigger boxes and count as a one-shot. Great to quickly create and then test the team against. 

We plan on putting the LCGs on sale for several weeks and will most likely kick the sale off sometime on Sunday, 24 April. We will be sure to put up our banner on the webstore so folks can get to the sale, but you can also just steer to them from the Card Games - Living Card Games menu too, or just click Arkham Horror LCG or The Lord of the Rings LCG. It's all good!

It's kind of sad, like the end of an era, but we'd rather transition to the new products, open up that space in the store for things that are selling well, and if we can help people fill the gaps in their current collections it's a win-win all around!

THAT'S WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

We've noticed an uptick in what I can only describe as fraud. As a retailer, there are numerous times when someone purchases someone else a game and doesn't leave us a message or anything. We process the order and get the game shipped out to the recipient and everyone's happy. We'd been operating this way for years, and never had any issues. 

However, lately we're seeing the same thing, except there has been a few times when the buyer didn't authorize the purchase at all. This puts us out both the money for the item...and the item itself. Frustrating! I can also say we've only seen this behavior thru the PayPal purchasing side as Stripe has been rock solid the entire time. 

We contemplated all sorts of ways to thwart this kind of behavior, but no operational changes really work. We don't want to mandate phone numbers as many people don't like giving those out. We don't want to mandate a 'gift message' as we've never had to do that before. So, we went 21st century. 

We added a plugin that checks for fraudulent activity as the orders are being processed. There's a weight to actions. Each 'odd' action increases a running fraud score, and once that score gets to 70 it will put the transaction on hold, and if it gets to 90 it'll cancel the transaction altogether. When using PayPal, the system will also send an email asking the buyer to verify their PayPal email address. 

I can say we did not want to do this, but because of a few bad apples out there we have to add layers to protect both you and us.

By the way, the title of this article is something we used to say in the military when one or two people did something really idiotic and forced a change to make things harder on the rest of us. I thought it was appropriate. 

TEAM EARTH

Last Friday the 22nd was Earth Day. Initiated in 1970, it's the one day of the year focused on environmental protection. Here's a quick video on why we celebrate Earth Day.