We've made some profound website changes.
So when I first started laying this out, I wanted to talk about a million things that have improved with the new UX of our website. But I'm told that no one has the attention span for a blog anymore. I've probably already lost a lot of people by not including a 20-second video of me screaming.
Not you, though. Not you.
The first thing I want to say is that everything should be pretty obvious if you just try to do the things you normally do on the site. Place orders for things you want, manage your subscriptions, update your information, etc. You shouldn't need to read anything to have a good experience if the UX is good.
It literally means "user experience". So just be a user and have a better experience!
But if you're curious, I think these are the three most massive shifts.
1. We're leveraging our pay later feature.
The simplest way to understand our product subscriptions is that you can reserve upcoming products without paying for them. This is actually a very complicated custom feature that we built a long time ago and have iterated on for over a decade.
When we launched subscriptions in 2011, it was because Zach found it annoying to keep up with the monthly LCG packs from Fantasy Flight Games. As we've grown as a business, it's now being applied to yearly releases, quarterly releases, and releases that have no real cadence, and it's being applied on a much bigger scale.
Yet the form factor has been the same—until now.
We've decoupled the subscription function from the pay later function, which means that you can place pay later orders that get charged 1-5 weeks before release right from the front-end of the site, rather than having to sign up for something.
Like right now, let's say you want to pre-order the next Sorcery Set, Gothic, after the Dragonlord sell out. Historically this would mean going to the Sorcery page and then seeing the Sorcery TCG Booster Box Subscription at the top of the page, full of all the disclaimer text needed to explain exactly how things work. If you scrolled down, you'd see a release history with Gothic listed as the "Next Charge". Then you'd decide if you want to sign up for a subscription, something that every company around the world is trying to get you to do.
Even though our subscription is different we have to spend so much time trying to explain that, and that's just not great.
Now, instead, you go to the Sorcery page, see the Gothic Booster Box with pay later as the payment option, and checkout as normal. Talk about an angel getting its wings.
After you checkout, you'll be given the option to start a subscription, and you can always start one from your Account, but it's not a requirement to take advantage of this powerful ability to lock in pre-orders without having to pay for them months ahead of time.
2. We've completely retooled order statuses.
With the pay later option employed on the front-end, we now have two statuses that reflect the initial status of an order: Reserved and Paid.
A Reserved order is one that hasn't been paid for, and a Paid order is, you guessed it, one that has.
If you choose pay later, you won't pay anything and your order will be Reserved. If you choose pay now, you will be charged during checkout and your order will be Paid.
1-5 weeks before the release date of a product group, all Reserved orders for that product group are charged, and then they enter Paid status.
From there, these orders go to Processing (actively being packed up and can't be changed), then In Transit (actually shipped out, with tracking), and then Delivered.
You get notifications throughout the process and can feel much more secure knowing exactly what's going on.
Additionally, you can edit orders in Reserved and Paid status essentially to your heart's content. Change payment and shipping, add items by placing new orders, change quantities, and cancel if you change your mind. You can even pay early for Reserved orders to kick them into Paid status on your terms.
You'll see how impactful these changes are as current and future orders play out.
3. Automatic order separation.
This sounds pretty boring when I type it, but in the previous build you couldn't enter checkout with different product groups in your cart. So if you wanted to pre-order both Earthborne and Alpha Clash, which release at different times, you had to go through checkout two separate times.
Now, you can add all the products you want, regardless of what product group they're in, when they release, etc and during the review step of checkout they'll be separated out into different orders based on release date.
So if you wanted both Earthborne and Alpha Clash, you'd add both to your cart, go through checkout, and then see that two separate orders will be created when you confirm the checkout. Those two orders then exist independently.
Scratching the surface.
There's so many things here. You'll discover them as you go. Subscriptions can be added via Account and they now create Reserved orders ahead of time instead of being charged rather suddenly. The self-service options for orders are through the roof. You can choose your preferred shipping service—even if free shipping is chosen.
The contact and support options are much more clear and available. We've got this incredible, minimal blog now.
Everything is componentized for a much faster development cycle across the apps we're working on...a homepage that actually reflects who and what we are. Significant notification customization (finally)...
I better stop, because there's just so much. Go discover it! And let us know if you have any questions along the way, either via Discord, or our contact form, or by writing bugs@teamcovenant.com directly (for actual bugs).
It's been such a pleasure to continue improving things for an audience that supports us and believes in us. That's rare in this era of commerce. Launching today is the first step in a really exciting year to come.
-Steven