Used the new submission form? 4 4

[Fisionbomb]

Who's used the new submission form, thoughts? Better, worse, improvements, problems?

[Tony S]

Worse. Used it just now for several different submissions. 

It no longer possible to do multiple tiers in one session. You have to pick the tier you are submitting under.  Once selected you can't change. So if you have five moderns, five economy and one Express - you start over 3x. That's 3x entering address, 3x entering payment information. 3x the printing.  I'm sure it saves CGC a bit of time. When receiving logs in books they split off different tiers on one order form. Now they don't have to do that.  We did it for them. 

Even worse is I'm not sure what you would do if you make a mistake. Let's say for instance you sort out your submission of 20 books. Ten moderns, 10 economy. So you do the 10 moderns, print everything out and then start a new submission for the economy. And discover you missed a modern published 1/75.  I suppose you have to send the modern in as economy - or start over - throwing away the modern submission you did. Or it could be the opposite. You find a book published 12/74 in your "modern" stack. Economy already done. Old system you just typed in the book and the computer moved it into the right tier. 

The look up function is really horrid for modern books. For instance there has been a jillion Amazing Spider-man titles. So you have to either scroll through a long list trying to find the right issue #4, or you have to type in the date.  Sometimes it's 09/14. But a different title published Sept 2014 might not be found unless you type 9/14.  And you still have to sort through the various Canadian and Swedish and variant covers to find your book. 

CGC continues down it's path to kill trees. Remember the day when you could do a submission of 20 books and the submission printed out on  sheet of paper? If you printed a copy for yourself it was two pieces of paper.  Now a submission of one book is four pages. 

I also had weirdness where when it was time to enter payment information that if I wanted to pay with a check, CGC wanted more $$ than the total of the order. Credit card was the submission amount. IDK if that means CGC thinks I have some outstanding balance or what. I guess I'll call accounting tomorrow to check on that. 

I suppose a web designer thinks it looks prettier, but any enhanced functionality is aimed at making CGC's side easier. 

[dena]

Thanks all for your feedback. We are working to address all concerns immediately.

Answers in red to some questions so far:

It no longer possible to do multiple tiers in one session. You have to pick the tier you are submitting under.  Once selected you can't change. So if you have five moderns, five economy and one Express - you start over 3x. That's 3x entering address, 3x entering payment information. 3x the printing.  I'm sure it saves CGC a bit of time. When receiving logs in books they split off different tiers on one order form. Now they don't have to do that.  We did it for them. You can add multiple Tiers in one session. When you are in your cart, there is an option to Add Another Service

Even worse is I'm not sure what you would do if you make a mistake. Let's say for instance you sort out your submission of 20 books. Ten moderns, 10 economy. So you do the 10 moderns, print everything out and then start a new submission for the economy. And discover you missed a modern published 1/75.  I suppose you have to send the modern in as economy - or start over - throwing away the modern submission you did. Or it could be the opposite. You find a book published 12/74 in your "modern" stack. Economy already done. Old system you just typed in the book and the computer moved it into the right tier. Since you can have multiple tiers in a session as indicated above, this would not be an issue. You could either go to your cart and 'Add Another Service' or, if you are working on your Economy and add a Modern book, the form will let you know that it is out of the date range for Economy and will ask you if you'd like to add another service to your session.

The look up function is really horrid for modern books. For instance there has been a jillion Amazing Spider-man titles. So you have to either scroll through a long list trying to find the right issue #4, or you have to type in the date.  Sometimes it's 09/14. But a different title published Sept 2014 might not be found unless you type 9/14.  And you still have to sort through the various Canadian and Swedish and variant covers to find your book. We are aware the typeahead is an issue and we are working to tweak the sorting so it better returns the results you would expect. That is a top priority for us and we intend to fix this ASAP.

CGC continues down it's path to kill trees. Remember the day when you could do a submission of 20 books and the submission printed out on  sheet of paper? If you printed a copy for yourself it was two pieces of paper.  Now a submission of one book is four pages. That should not be the case and I am looking into this.

I also had weirdness where when it was time to enter payment information that if I wanted to pay with a check, CGC wanted more $$ than the total of the order. Credit card was the submission amount. IDK if that means CGC thinks I have some outstanding balance or what. I guess I'll call accounting tomorrow to check on that. This should also not be the case. The form should be charging the same regardless of the payment method. I am looking into this right away.

I suppose a web designer thinks it looks prettier, but any enhanced functionality is aimed at making CGC's side easier. This is not the case. We had overwhelming feedback that the old format had it's own issues and the goal in changing to this new format was to provide a faster experience for the customer. Also, the typeahead, when delivering results more efficiently, will get the user to the correct item in our database which will make it quicker for receiving to get your submissions verified and in the queue faster. We've seen evidence of this in our other verticals. The number of trading cards coming in correctly identified nearly doubled when the transition was made from the old format to the new format. I realize that it is hard to see the benefit now when the typeahead is not performing in the way it should. However, we are committed to making this a superior experience and your feedback helps us get there. 

 

[Tony S]

Thank you Dena. Appreciate your looking into some issues. My apologies for missing the "add another service". 

As for what you refer to as the typehead, it's hard for me to grasp the concept that the current inputting of title/issue number will ever be easier to use than the old.  Yes, the old required multiple fields to be filled out. But those multiple fields in a logical way honed in on the exact issue being sent in. First enter/select title, then publisher, then issue number, then publication date and a final field to enter things like variant covers, later printings, foreign edition, price variants. 

Trying to do all that in one space runs into the problem I described (and encountered) with modern books (that is published since 1975) of popular characters. Marvel has done a lot of comic books entitled "Amazing Spider-Man" since 1975.  Pretty much all made it to issue 4.  Then there are variant covers, foreign publishers, price variants, later printings. The list of comic books title/issue of Amazing Spider-Man 4 is just a L O N G one. Step by step narrowing it down - for me anyway - seems a lot easier. 

What's likely to happen - in a greater degree - is what was happening with the old system. User's can't find their book so they just create a new listing. 

What I did find helpful was to enter Amazing Spider-Man and then the publication date. Don't bother with issue number. While there are still a lot more Amazing Spider-Man's published 09/14 than you would think, the list is smaller by many multiples and you can find your book. 

I have to say I rather dread the idea of doing a submission of 20 foreign editions with this new system. Maybe I'm wrong and it won't be so bad.....

As for the different amounts due showing on the payment screen for credit card vs check, maybe some additional information might help you identify the problem.  I did three submissions last night, one right after the other. So over a period of an hour or so. The first submission the amount due by check was $630 more than the submission total/amount due by credit card. Now $630 is exactly the amount of an accounting error I had worked on with CGC accounting to fix just two days earlier.  So my first thought was I needed to call up and say "you've billed the right person now but it looks like you haven't applied the $630 back where it belongs". But then the next two submissions the amount due by check was exactly $100 more than the submission total/amount due via credit card. So it looked much more random. 

Again, thank you for your work on this. 


 

Edited December 17, 2021 by Tony S

[dena]

Thanks for providing that additional information about the payment screen. We already have a fix in place on our staging site and will make that live on Monday. We would put the fix in place today but we always shy away from doing site deployments on a Friday in case it results in something breaking elsewhere and then there are issues going into the weekend. Thanks so much for bringing it to our attention.

Regarding the typeahead field, we already have some ideas in the works and a group of us are meeting Monday to see if those ideas get us where we need to be. Our objective is always to make a better online experience for the customer . If that means adding a different element to the design, that's what we'll do. Any comments made here will be shared with the team and once we've made adjustments, I'd really love to get your feedback about whether we're hitting the mark or if we still have work to do.

We are dealing with this as an urgent issue. Stay tuned.

 

[sckao]

Yes. The Typeahead problem seems to be a Chicken or the Egg scenario. I typed in "Deadpool" to enter the 1993 Deadpool #1 comic and I had a hard time getting past this field. I literally had to know the month and year from your own census to actually get the field to find the issue given so many options. Just entering "Deadpool" returned over 50 entries, none on which were #1. I think in the old form, you could at least make an educated guess from the handful of possible dates that popped up. I guess it's assumed that the user will know the month and year of publication from the indicia, but I personally wouldn't want to take my comics out of their bag and board again just to find the date after I've carefully assembled a bunch of comics to send in for slabbing. (I don't even like to open them if they are warehouse copies.) Assuming that the user will use other online resources to find the month and year is also something you really can't assume. (Although many will use that route.) All of these things pause the form filling process and make the user go externally to find the data needed to fill out your form. Each time that happens, you literally are gambling that the user cares enough to come back and complete the form. 

Ideally, when you enter the title, the possible covers would come up which would make it easier to identify which comic and which volume/series it is from. 

Even knowing the month and date is problematic here as the results are also confusing. There are also no standardized examples of what a correct Search String would look like in the popup help box.

 

Finding it in your census is also a problem. That first entry doesn't actually exist as a valid title in your database apparently and GPA does not recognize that as the title for the 1993 mini-series.

If you search your census for Deadpool: The Circle Chase, you get this TPB? from 1996 which collects issues 1-4.:

 

[Tony S]

What Sacko said.

Walking Dead 1 has 253 cover variants. Spider-Man 666 has 145. . And while that's the top 2, thousands of other modern comics have been issued - and will continue to be issued - with dozens of variants.  Can you imagine scrolling trying to find the right one?  Along with any foreign variants?  Need to be a way to hone it down some. 

[iae21]

Hi @dena, I've noticed now that when you are submitted a large +25 book Pre-Screen order, you have to submit the full order for one minimum pre-screen grade (i.e 9.6 min grade for all).  

In the past, you were able to submit +25 books for pre-sceeen, but were able to select your minimum pre-screen grade per book (i.e. 10 books @ 9.4 min grade, 15 books @ 9.6 min grade).   Now the whole order needs to be either a 9.4 min grade or a 9.6 min grade for all books, not split.

By removing this functionality, you are really inconveniencing alot of customers who use the Pre-Screen option often!  This change was never communicated at all, and is taking away something that was always available to us over the past few years.

Is there a way that this can be changed in the near future?  

 

[Gaard]

On 12/18/2021 at 9:19 AM, iae21 said:

Hi @dena, I've noticed now that when you are submitted a large +25 book Pre-Screen order, you have to submit the full order for one minimum pre-screen grade (i.e 9.6 min grade for all).  

In the past, you were able to submit +25 books for pre-sceeen, but were able to select your minimum pre-screen grade per book (i.e. 10 books @ 9.4 min grade, 15 books @ 9.6 min grade).   Now the whole order needs to be either a 9.4 min grade or a 9.6 min grade for all books, not split.

By removing this functionality, you are really inconveniencing alot of customers who use the Pre-Screen option often!  This change was never communicated at all, and is taking away something that was always available to us over the past few years.

Is there a way that this can be changed in the near future?  

 

Unless I missed the memo, which is very possible, I didn't think what you're describing was possible. It is across the street (is that even a saying anymore since they moved?), but I didn't think CGC let you do that.

[iae21]

On 12/18/2021 at 9:46 AM, Gaard said:

Unless I missed the memo, which is very possible, I didn't think what you're describing was possible. It is across the street (is that even a saying anymore since they moved?), but I didn't think CGC let you do that.

Oh yes they did 100% ....I have been doing that for at least two plus years before the change.   

 

[Gaard]

On 12/18/2021 at 9:50 AM, iae21 said:

Oh yes they did 100% ....I have been doing that for at least two plus years before the change.   

 

I stand corrected then. They must've changes their policy without checking with me first. S.O.B.s 

[Tony S]

With prescreens, what was done in the past is you could list different prescreen grades in a 25 or more submission - but at the end of the process it was split into separate submissions for each grade tier.  You could do multiple grade prescreens (9.2 plus 9.4 plus 9.6) but you paid separate shipping on each grade back. 

Maybe you can still do this - by selecting "add another service"  near the end as Dena describes in her first posted response? 

[dena]

On 12/17/2021 at 3:35 PM, sckao said:

Ideally, when you enter the title, the possible covers would come up which would make it easier to identify which comic and which volume/series it is from. 

 

Yes! This was already on our list of enhancements that would follow after the initial release.

Great information provided here so far. Thank you. I think the typeahead wasn't an issue on our trading card and sports card forms because those databases are a fraction of the size of the comics database. We had some input on the best way to manage the comics typeahead but the tricky part is addressing various scenarios. Clearly we did not get that quite right but we will. Our top goal is to make it easier for the end user. 

[iae21]

On 12/19/2021 at 2:50 PM, Tony S said:

With prescreens, what was done in the past is you could list different prescreen grades in a 25 or more submission - but at the end of the process it was split into separate submissions for each grade tier.  You could do multiple grade prescreens (9.2 plus 9.4 plus 9.6) but you paid separate shipping on each grade back. 

Maybe you can still do this - by selecting "add another service"  near the end as Dena describes in her first posted response? 

Thank you Tony, however you did not have to pay for add'l shipping per grade.

 

I wish I can access my previous submission documents (site is down), but for example, I submitted 25 book pre-screen moderns, and when selecting a minimum pre-screen grade overall (i.e. 9.6), I was then able to move the pre-sceeen level up and down per book (i.e if I thought one of the 25 would not make a 9.6, I can select that PS grade to be a 9.0).   I always received the shipment back, one time, per 25 book order.

 

@dena- Can you please add back this functionality, or let me know how to enter a 25 book pre-screen book with different pre-screen grades per book??

[bshowell]

I have been trying to create an order using the new system all weekend but every time I hit the submit button it says my order can't be submitted now, try again later. I've tried two different payment methods so my cards being declined are not the problem.

[dena]

On 12/20/2021 at 3:07 PM, bshowell said:

I have been trying to create an order using the new system all weekend but every time I hit the submit button it says my order can't be submitted now, try again later. I've tried two different payment methods so my cards being declined are not the problem.

Recently we saw this error when there was an issue with a field length in the book description. I have a programmer looking into this and will get back to you ASAP.

[dena]

On 12/20/2021 at 10:28 AM, iae21 said:

Thank you Tony, however you did not have to pay for add'l shipping per grade.

 

I wish I can access my previous submission documents (site is down), but for example, I submitted 25 book pre-screen moderns, and when selecting a minimum pre-screen grade overall (i.e. 9.6), I was then able to move the pre-sceeen level up and down per book (i.e if I thought one of the 25 would not make a 9.6, I can select that PS grade to be a 9.0).   I always received the shipment back, one time, per 25 book order.

 

@dena- Can you please add back this functionality, or let me know how to enter a 25 book pre-screen book with different pre-screen grades per book??

Looking into this and will get back shortly with an answer. Thanks for your patience.

[sckao]

Submitting a standard modern slow-boat submission of 25. Once you get to the Select Payment Method, you get this for the Checking Option. (Note that the Order Total is actually $578.00 for 25 Moderns... but the check amount is saying $2,321.00 which is a bit alarming). 

 

Someone earlier also mentioned that the packing slip is four pages. It's two. (Two copies with two pages since the list of comics is in a table that if long enough will require a page of its own when printed.) This is standard behavior when printing tables.

Edited December 21, 2021 by sckao

[dena]

On 12/20/2021 at 8:53 PM, sckao said:

Submitting a standard modern slow-boat submission of 25. Once you get to the Select Payment Method, you get this for the Checking Option. (Note that the Order Total is actually $578.00 for 25 Moderns... but the check amount is saying $2,321.00 which is a bit alarming). 

 

Someone earlier also mentioned that the packing slip is four pages. It's two. Two copies with two pages since the list of comics is in a table that if long enough will require a page of its own when printed.) This is standard behavior when printing tables.

Thanks for reporting. There is a fix being released later today that will address that check amount problem.

[iae21]

On 12/20/2021 at 3:17 PM, dena said:

Looking into this and will get back shortly with an answer. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks @dena, please let me know.   You can reach out to me separately, I have at least 10 or so submissions in the past year where I was able to select different Pre-Screens per book to a large order.   I can provide you that support to prove that it worked that way previously.  

Edited December 21, 2021 by iae21