Hey guys, I've posted here a few times. I'm the owner of a small press publishing company. We specialize in premium signed limited edition hardcovers. It's a great product for a niche market, but there is lots, and I mean lots of overhead. From paying the authors to producing the product to marketing it and shipping it... we do it all. Every step of the process from receiving the manuscript for a potential new book as a Word DOC to delivering the final product to a customer is currently on us.
Well, I'm sure many of you here are familiar with the woes of shipping physical products internationally. Avoiding high fees for the receiver (customer), speedy and safe delivery but most important: affordability, these are all crucial.
Here's the problem: to ship one of our signed collectible hardcovers to the UK (one of our biggest markets) in a 2lb package it costs around $20 on average. Sometimes that can be the cost of manufacturing the product itself.
Shipping eats up a huge portion of our revenue, and it's an area where I know we could be saving a lot of money if we could find a few clever solutions.
Something that eBay started recently was Global Shipping Centers. You ship your packed eBay order to the U.S. based Global Shipping Center and they handle it from there... you only pay to ship the package to them! These centers have negotiated cheaper international shipping rates with USPS, UPS, FedEx etc. This seems like a great solution, but the problem is: we don't have that high of a volume of orders, and our specialty hardcover runs are usually somewhere in the range of 100 to 300 copies. We do paperbacks as well, but we are still a very small company.
So we've been trying to come up with other solutions. One idea I had is to find either a shipping center or an independent book seller in the UK/other Euro countries that we could ship a portion of our books to via freight or Airmail M bags. The center/bookseller could then ship the orders for us as they come in for a fee. Granted there would be a fee and extra labor involved this way, but I'm convinced it would be more efficient with both money and time to have the books shipped within the UK. Even with the extra labor I'm convinced we could save at least 20% on our international shipping costs, which would save a huge chunk of change over the long term.
Let me boil down this post to a single question: to those who own a small business that produces a physical product and relies heavily on their direct customer base, what solutions have you found for international shipping that are working well for you?
I would greatly appreciate anyone sharing with me any systems or ideas that they have that could save time and money with international shipping. It's one of those areas of our business where I know there are solutions that could be saving us a lot of money, but we just need to find the right way to do it.
Thanks guys, and sincerely hope to hear from some of you!
Well, I'm sure many of you here are familiar with the woes of shipping physical products internationally. Avoiding high fees for the receiver (customer), speedy and safe delivery but most important: affordability, these are all crucial.
Here's the problem: to ship one of our signed collectible hardcovers to the UK (one of our biggest markets) in a 2lb package it costs around $20 on average. Sometimes that can be the cost of manufacturing the product itself.
Shipping eats up a huge portion of our revenue, and it's an area where I know we could be saving a lot of money if we could find a few clever solutions.
Something that eBay started recently was Global Shipping Centers. You ship your packed eBay order to the U.S. based Global Shipping Center and they handle it from there... you only pay to ship the package to them! These centers have negotiated cheaper international shipping rates with USPS, UPS, FedEx etc. This seems like a great solution, but the problem is: we don't have that high of a volume of orders, and our specialty hardcover runs are usually somewhere in the range of 100 to 300 copies. We do paperbacks as well, but we are still a very small company.
So we've been trying to come up with other solutions. One idea I had is to find either a shipping center or an independent book seller in the UK/other Euro countries that we could ship a portion of our books to via freight or Airmail M bags. The center/bookseller could then ship the orders for us as they come in for a fee. Granted there would be a fee and extra labor involved this way, but I'm convinced it would be more efficient with both money and time to have the books shipped within the UK. Even with the extra labor I'm convinced we could save at least 20% on our international shipping costs, which would save a huge chunk of change over the long term.
Let me boil down this post to a single question: to those who own a small business that produces a physical product and relies heavily on their direct customer base, what solutions have you found for international shipping that are working well for you?
I would greatly appreciate anyone sharing with me any systems or ideas that they have that could save time and money with international shipping. It's one of those areas of our business where I know there are solutions that could be saving us a lot of money, but we just need to find the right way to do it.
Thanks guys, and sincerely hope to hear from some of you!
via Small-Business-Forum.net http://www.small-business-forum.net/managing-your-business/10565-we-need-solution-international-shipping-getting-ridiculous.html
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire