Book sellers can take advantage of privileged international shipping rates. Contact us to find out if you could save.
Selling books online is big business with book sellers taking 70% of the market share of book sales and 942 million printed books were sold in the US alone in 2020.
Of course, there are a lot of reasons for this, not least of all it’s convenient and quite often bookworms can access publications they may not be able to get in their high street store.
One major benefit of selling books online though is the shipping cost can be cheaper than other sectors, mostly because books are typically thin and some postal operators around the world offer discounts for thin packages.
Why are these cheaper international delivery rates available?
Thin packages are cheaper to deliver because they fit through the letterbox. This means that most packages can be delivered first time. If the delivery company doesn't have to attempt deliver more than once it keeps their costs down, which they can pass on to customers.
Additionally, books can be packed in a box or wrap that fits tightly, this saves delivery companies from shipping air around the world, which is a common problem with larger packages.
So how else can you make your online bookstore a success and maximise your profit too.
Packaging
From the latest crime thrillers to photobooks about World War 2, books tend to come in the same size and shape, so you know you’ll only need a few variations to make sure your packaging gets your books to your customers safely.
This means you can bulk buy, pushing your costs down and have simply corrugated foldable packaging too which is easy and quick to process. Simply fold, stick, attach a label and your order is on its way.
Companies like Raja UK (formerly Raja Pack) and SpringPack are already primed to support a book stores packaging requirements if you’re shipping yourself, whereas companies like Asendia will be able to provide shipping as well as the right packaging for your books so you can concentrate on growing your online presence instead.
Independent Vs corporate store
It’s no secret that the likes of Amazon make a lot of money from online book sales, and they’re helped revolutionise the market.
That doesn’t mean smaller independent shops can’t make the most of what they’ve developed too, and if you have a physical book shop in a local town, opening up your doors to online sales can make a big difference to your profit.
Let’s say you’re a niche book seller, well, in the U.S., approximately 1,700 independent bookselling companies are operating 4,100 stores online and offline.
That’s a lot of books and a lot of customers and much of those sales will also be online with each company’s website selling a broad range of, or specialist books to people across the country.
There’s big business in specialising too. Children’s fiction is the most popular genre of books sold, achieving over 1 billion books sold in 2020, while religious books and bibles are the most popular adult genre, with 21.2 million sold.
So, if you have a physical store, whether you sell a broad range of titles of specialise in a specific genre, there’s no reason why you can’t mix your clicks with bricks and develop an online shop to compliment your offline presence.
In fact, you don’t even really need to do much to start selling as sites like www.bookshop.org will help you create a web presence with a few clicks, and they say they’ve already generated over £2million for local bookstores.
Getting online will open you up to a whole new audience and with the simple packaging and shipping options available, it’s no more difficult than selling over a counter.
International success
You may feel that being a book seller in England will limit your potential to sell overseas might be limited, but with 1.5 billion English speakers across the globe, international book sales are ready for the taking.
You’ll just need to make sure you are compliant with packaging requirements, border taxes and anything else that might need to be covered should you ship to a different territory of culture, including books that might not be legal in some countries.
If you are going to ship books overseas then you can do your own research and make sure you and your staff are fully trained to make sure every order is processed appropriately, but with so many possible options this is time consuming and expensive.
Instead, the best option is to employ a third-party handler who can cover everything from storing stock, packaging, shipping, last mile delivery and returns.
Asendia, does all those things and already worked with book sellers of all sizes to great success. Maybe you could make the most of the benefits they can offer too.
Just drop them a line and see how they can help you become a best seller for book sales.
