25/03/2020: Covid-19 update: Important update on product availability

Dear customer,

The COVID-19 crisis continues to take hold of all our lives. We hope each and everyone of you stays safe and healthy. Stay at home if you can, and if you can't please adhere to all safety restrictions that your government imposes. It's important we all look after each other.

Obviously all of this is also impacting Archonia in various ways. Our office personnel are working from home as much as possible and we've implemented various safety measures in our warehouse in terms of sanitation and we have to adhere to the social distancing requirements. This allows us to keep our store open (for the time being at least) and although there might be some delays here and there, we will do our best to feed your appetite for manga, anime, comics, graphic novels and collectibles.

We've had to make some changes to our shipping options because many stores that are pick-up points for UPS, DPD or DHL were forced to temporarily close their doors. But the good news is that home deliveries are still possible, and we hope this will remain the case while we're all fighting this crisis together. As long as PostNL, DHL and DPD are able to transport goods from us to you, we'll do our utmost best to keep sending them.

Several European distributors have had to temporarily suspend all deliveries, but so far the impact for us was fairly limited in terms of product availability. However, news has reached us that Diamond Comics - the largest distributor of comics & graphic novels in the world - will no longer be shipping new products to their customers (retail stores) in the foreseeable future. This means that all new comic books with an in-store date of April 1st and beyond will not be shipped to us. Pre-orders will be accumulated at the distributor during this period, but we will not be receiving any new product until they re-open for business. So you can still place pre-orders, just don't rely too much on the currently set release dates. Free Comic Book Day has also been postponed to a later day somewhere this summer. How this will ultimately impact scheduled releases for April, May and beyond, we do not yet know. Time will tell.

If you order comics that are currently not in stock at Archonia, but they are in stock at the distributor we will send your backorder in, but for the time being we cannot say when we'll receive it. It will definitely be longer than the 2 to 3 weeks that you are used to. So in this we ask your patience as well. In a nutshell, all avid comic book readers will have to wait a while longer for their "new comic book day"-fix. However, we have loads of in stock comics and graphic novels so there's still a huge catalog for you to choose from while we wait for the situation to return to normal.

For manga and collectibles we mostly work with other distributors and for now most of them remain open for business. However, new product will be delayed there as well since many production factories all over the world are also closed or working at a slower rate. So we will still be getting items from time to time but far less than usual. We have plenty of these goods stocked in our warehouse though, so please, come and have a look!

And of course, for those of you that have pre-order lists, we ask you to have a look at what is already available, finalize everything and have it all shipped to you while this is still possible. Now's the perfect time for doing just that since we all know that "waiting for that one extra item that's scheduled for next week" is pointless. If you want to you can also purchase additional in stock items and ask us to add them to the same shipment to save on shipping costs!

It goes without saying that we hope that the fight against the COVID-19 virus will soon be over (with humanity as the victor, obviously) and then everything can return to normal. In the meantime though, stay at home, keep your distance and stay safe!

Take care!
Your friends at Archonia