What should I do - Shipping to Ireland etc
Please someone help, I don't know how to deal with this. Basically should I take the loss and sell the book or should I cancel the order due to what is clearly a pricing error? (Maybe by myself and I am missing something?)
This isn't the first time this has happened, as you will see;
Sold a book for £1.40, which was to Ireland (I am based on Essex, England), this included, as per Amazon's template, £5.70 postage so £7.10 all-in-all.
Amazon obviously take their set fee plus the % from the whole £7.10 which came to £2.53, leaving £4.57, less postage, less packaging, less price of the book, which already leaves me out of pocket as it is, before even taking my time and additional expenses into account.
Amazon's suggested postage ranged from £18-£20. This would obviously be a massive loss to me in comparison to the low pricing of the product. It wasn't much less when going through RM.
What am I supposed to do here? I have had to cancel 4 orders in the last 2 months due to this.
To make matters worse; in January I have only sold about 6 items which means that I have already received a 'warning' from Amazon that I am over the target for sales cancellations and risk having my account suspended due to this.
If I posted all 4 of the books then Amazon would have made a good few 10s of pounds whilst I would have LOST about £45 minimum.
Maybe I've set the incorrect template, maybe this is just a cost of doing business, either way I am getting a little fed up of working hard and having all profits stripped from me one way or the other.
I really wouldn't want to leave my Irish (and others!) customers without the product they wanted but I don't see any way of this being feasible!!
TIA,
Fred
What should I do - Shipping to Ireland etc
Please someone help, I don't know how to deal with this. Basically should I take the loss and sell the book or should I cancel the order due to what is clearly a pricing error? (Maybe by myself and I am missing something?)
This isn't the first time this has happened, as you will see;
Sold a book for £1.40, which was to Ireland (I am based on Essex, England), this included, as per Amazon's template, £5.70 postage so £7.10 all-in-all.
Amazon obviously take their set fee plus the % from the whole £7.10 which came to £2.53, leaving £4.57, less postage, less packaging, less price of the book, which already leaves me out of pocket as it is, before even taking my time and additional expenses into account.
Amazon's suggested postage ranged from £18-£20. This would obviously be a massive loss to me in comparison to the low pricing of the product. It wasn't much less when going through RM.
What am I supposed to do here? I have had to cancel 4 orders in the last 2 months due to this.
To make matters worse; in January I have only sold about 6 items which means that I have already received a 'warning' from Amazon that I am over the target for sales cancellations and risk having my account suspended due to this.
If I posted all 4 of the books then Amazon would have made a good few 10s of pounds whilst I would have LOST about £45 minimum.
Maybe I've set the incorrect template, maybe this is just a cost of doing business, either way I am getting a little fed up of working hard and having all profits stripped from me one way or the other.
I really wouldn't want to leave my Irish (and others!) customers without the product they wanted but I don't see any way of this being feasible!!
TIA,
Fred
10 replies
Seller_FQHkqHJI5SqTh
Can't help with your kamikaze pricing but DPD bought direct from DPD are usually cheaper than RM to Ireland.
Seller_ZJhFeE3tNKzfh
- When you say Ireland - do you mean Northern Ireland or Republic of Ireland?
- Are you on the Individual Selling Plan (ie a fee is charged per sale) or the Professional Selling Plan (£30 per month)
Given you state that shipping was included 'as per Amazon's template' I would guess that you are on the Individual Selling plan where you can't set your own postage rates.
As such, you'd need to uplift the cost of the book to ofset the postage costs. Though in all likelihood - you need to turn off international shipping on your shipping settings.
The alternative is to move to the £30 per month Pro Selling plan where you CAN set your own postage costs and set a more realistic postage cost to ireland.
Seller_ZVAz3d5lZuGid
"Sold a book for £1.40"
I too am a bookseller, and to be totally honest it really is not worth selling books for anything less than at least £5, as there is no profit in it at all, and definitely not when sending overseas. Are you on the professional selling plan where you can set your own shipping templates ? - if so then it is obvious that you have not worked out the correct cost of sending your items to Ireland (presumably Eire - southern Ireland ?). You need to take into account the size and weight to set the correct templates.
I stopped selling overseas after Brexit because the shipping cost is too high.
Seller_RAXEWLxQ2dbmN
"that I...sell for a small loss in the hope that I can get some good feedback"
The old saying that 'profit is sanity, turnover is vanity' comes to mind here!
You will never be able to compete with megasellers on price, not unless/until you approach their volume of sales and corresponding low postage rates. It's a very different model to the average small Amazon bookseller.
I also think it is probably a mistake to sell at a loss simply to garner more feedback. Buyers are not always appreciative at that end of the market...
