A long time ago in a July far away, I let you all know about Paizo’s plans to improve its tech infrastructure. While that has been a slower process than any of us have liked, here's an update on where we’re at and where we’re going.
The Foundation
Paizo began work on modernizing its backend infrastructure in 2023 to allow us easier and faster access to the boring business analytics and insights that we’ve historically had to assemble by spreadsheets over the years. When completed, it will greatly improve our ability to ensure that we have the right products available at the right time and in the right quantities for our customers, send more timely reports to our business partners, and overall streamline internal processes that are stretched across several systems.
Part of this core infrastructure is the rollout of a new warehouse management system. The first part of this is live today, with orders to our hobby and book distributors being picked and shipped from the new system. The next step will be when the new ecommerce store goes live. From your side, you’ll see faster and more accurate orders and trackable shipping details. In addition, Paizo won’t need to shut down for a week every year to do inventory. Instead, the system has us run mini-inventories every week throughout the year.
The New Store
The team is hard at work on a brand-new store experience, reorganizing the entirety of Paizo’s products into more coherent and easier-to-find locations, extracting data from our legacy system, and more.
Much of what you see on Paizo.com today has been built internally over the years and is affectionately known as Presto. Back when Paizo began, ecommerce software to handle subscriptions didn’t really exist, so we built our own solution from the ground up. Presto currently does the heavy lifting for the ecommerce store, forums, shipping and package tracking, and more. It also provides a variety of reports that the finance team imports into their accounting software, the sales team uses to track sales, etc.
The new store will replace all of the shopping pages on the site: product pages, category pages, and store landing pages–including the subscriptions landing page, providing a more modern, streamlined shopping experience for customers, including a single-page checkout!
Areas that will stay the same for now will be the forums, Organized Play reporting, the blog, and a dozen or so landing pages. Here’s a brief rundown of the new things you’ll see at the Paizo Store when it launches.
Paizo Plus Loyalty Program
The Paizo Advantage is our current loyalty program. It gives subscribers access to free Pathfinder Society or Starfinder Society releases if you subscribe to 4 lines and both if you subscribe to 6 or more. It also grants 15% off most of your Paizo.com purchases.
The new Paizo Plus program will give you more choices for your rewards. You’ll earn virtual gold on your purchases that you can use for things like coupons for society scenarios, $5–20 off coupons, and the top tier will grant 15% off all your purchases just like today. You’ll also be able to earn gold by writing reviews of your purchases, by referring your friends to the new store, by following Paizo on social media, by joining the new program, and on your birthday!
There will be changes vs. how we do things today, of course, but we’ve worked hard to create a program that lets you keep what you want from today’s loyalty program and expand it out to something even better. We’ll be sharing more details on the new Paizo Plus in an upcoming blog.
Library
We’re very excited to be unveiling a new file library when the new store launches as well. This replaces your Digital Content portal that exists today and offers more streamlined search capabilities using filters and a search box, a new look, the ability to download multiple products at once, and more! Everything you currently have in your current Digital Content will migrate to the new Library.
New Payment Methods
We will be expanding payment methods with the new store. Here are a few that we are targeting for launch.
Credit Cards: American Express, Aura, Diners Club, Discover, ELO, Hipercard, JCB, Mada, Mastercard, RuPay (India), UnionPay, Visa.
Digital Wallets: Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal.
Online Bank Transfers: Sofort
Some of these payment methods are region specific (like Hipercard for Brazil or RuPay for India), so you won’t be flooded with options when you checkout. Not all payment methods can be used for subscription payments because some providers don’t allow recurring payments, but you’ll see available options as you go through checkout for subscriptions.
New Subscription Portal
Starting with the launch of the new store, subscribers will be able to manage their subscriptions directly from their dashboard. This will allow you to skip, cancel, or suspend a subscription without the need to contact the customer service team.
Subscribers will be able to continue to “sidecart” products into their upcoming subscriptions through what’s now called combined shipping. This is largely the same functionality we have now, but the process for adding items to your sidecart are a bit different. We’ll cover that in a future blog.
So… When?
The date for this launch was written during the Gap and is currently lost to human knowledge. Triune predicts that the date is soon(™), but I dare not tempt the machine gods by uttering a specific date.
Stay tuned!
Jim Butler
President
Paizo Tech Update
Thursday, April 10, 2025
