America’s biggest distributor of print comics will release an online pre-order system for comics readers — a change with big potential for the industry. Diamond Comics Distributors promises that the service, called Pullbox, will allow readers to pre-order their own comics through Diamond and pick them up at their local comic shop.

One of the biggest hurdles to getting new readers to buy monthly comics is the act of buying monthly comics itself, complicated by Diamond Comics Distributor’s monopolistic relationship with every major comics publisher in America. The standard workaround has been for readers to keep a “pull list” with their local store of what books they want to buy, so that the store can pre-order the books and set them aside for purchase by that reader.

According to Diamond’s announcement, readers will be able to use Pullbox to manage the the pull list they keep with their local shop from their browser, and will also be able to create individual “special orders” and a wishlist. On the retailer end, Pullbox will offer a number of features, including “back-end approval of new Pullbox customers, alerts to new orders, set ordering dates” and the ability to sync customers’ pre-orders with the rest of Diamond’s retailer ordering systems.

Currently, comic shops manage their pull lists and pre-orders in a range of individual ways, from keeping paper lists updated by customers in the store, to keeping lists updated by email correspondence with customers, to — at some larger retailers — creating online pull list systems from scratch. Before it was the biggest digital comics retailer in the industry, Comixology offered one such service to shops — though the company recently announced that it would be shuttering Pulllist.Comixology.com on March 30, 2018.

Diamond’s Pullbox service has the chance of immensely simplifying the pre-ordering process for readers and retailers, though it has not released much information on the service’s UI or mechanisms just yet, promising that demos will be available at its retailer summit in April.

“The new cloud-based software is part of a broader strategy by Diamond to create an easy way to funnel orders to local comic book shops and make the pre-order process a much more viable and vital process for the entire comics industry,” the company said in its announcement, and was “developed from the ground up to help customers place orders with their local comic shop.”

The industry’s pre-order system has existed relatively unchanged since 1997, when Diamond Comics Distributors won a de facto monopoly on comics shipping in the United States, Canada and the U.K. DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Image Comics, Archie Comics, Viz Comics and Dark Horse Comics print and ship their books exclusively through Diamond. It’s hard to describe the drawbacks of the way comics are currently ordered and sold without sounding hyperbolic — it’s cumbersome for readers, cumbersome for retailers, blurs the actual sale of comics and discourages innovation in the industry.

Pullbox will be free for readers, and Diamond said that retailer pricing would be announced “later.” The service does not have a set release date, with Diamond simply saying it would be available “later this spring” through PreviewsWorld.com.