Hello Vantage, We do not work with dropshippers. We have accounts with various publishers that send the books to us when we make an order and we in turn ship the books to the customer. Some of the publishers may ship directly to the client if we requested they do so. We would love to have the money and space to buy copies of the thousands of books available from our publishers and keep them in stock for immediate shipping, but that is not feasable. We are not a huge company with unlimited funds and warehouse space. We have bought what inventory we can and are constantly buying more, but there is no way we can stock it all. We were just wondering, if we were able to make all these books available to the buying public, would they be willing to wait on the shipments. Thank you for your opinion. I appreciate you taking the time. Sue
Actually, I think two business days is a pretty good shiping time. Rainbow is obnoxious that way; it's something like within two weeks (!!!). That's the main reason I don't order from them very often.
Hi Deena, We actually sell on Amazon so I am familiar with the prices and shipping methods. I am not familiar with Rainbow Resources and will have to check them out. As for prices, most of our homeschool books are priced similar to the other homeschool websites I've looked at. We do offer a selection of 'Value Line' books to suppliment the homeschool books which are priced at 40-80% off list and are, in some cases, much cheaper than what we sell the same books for on Amazon. There's no need to go that far below the lowest Amazon price. We can be competitive on prices, shipping and customer service. We just need to 'get the word out' and find our niche. Thank you and have a great weekend. Sue
Hi Jackie, Does Rainbow have the books in stock? I can't imagine taking two weeks to ship an order if the books are in stock. Of course we are not a large company with hundreds of orders a day either. Sue
I think Rainbow keeps them in stock. It's probably the largest place to order, and the two weeks is a maximum time. They get so many orders this time of year that I guess it keeps them really busy keeping up. Usually, it's more like 3 days. Rainbow's prices are the cheapest. Even so, I will buy most of my stuff used. When I go to the state conference the end of June, I have a list of everything I haven't yet bought. I go straight to Rainbow's booth and pick them up there, because I know they will be cheapest. And, as I said, what they don't have with them they will ship for free. I'm thinking Rainbow also has free shipping for orders over $50, too.
I have not read all the responses. However, my answer would be no I would not be willing to wait longer to get the books. You can buy most of books you mentioned from Amazon or your local educational store. To me, a discount is not enough to wait who knows how long for books. That's just me. I think most people are not willing to wait weeks for something they paid for.
Hi Jackie, I would imagine, if Rainbow is getting a huge volume of orders per day, it would be a tremendous job to keep up filling them. I know by the time I gather the books, inspect them, clean them, package them, print up the mailing/shipping label, and enter the order information into a spreadsheet, etc. it takes up alot of time even for the relatively small number of orders I get a day. I know we should strive for a big volume of orders, but I would kind of hate giving up the quality control I have by processing all the orders myself. I guess there's always a price for success. I will look at Rainbow's prices. It will be hard to compete with a company that can afford to buy in large quantities. Thank you for the information. It is very helpful. Sue
Hi AvaRose, Thank you for your response. It seems to be the concensus here that waiting for an order would not be tolerable. We may have to rethink this idea. Better to find this out now than to put all the work into entering the books into the website and then having nobody ordering them. There may also be some confusion as to which books are in stock and which ones are not, even though I would mark them. Thanks again, Sue
I would have to probably go with "no", too. Raising 4 kids on one blue-collar income makes for a tight budget. My oldest is going into 5th grade this fall & I have never spent more than $8 for a single book. I get the vast majority of my books from my local library's bookstore (25 cent paperbacks, 50 cent hardcovers) and thrift stores (10 cent books across the board). I came home a few weeks ago from a thrift store with 3 bags full of brand new workbooks & spent less than $6. I once came home from the library with 57 books & had spent just over $17. Older books don't bother me a bit.... the only things that change are recent history & new science technology. We can fill in those blanks with other resoureces.
Laja, there was a book that I needed that supposedly the library had. (NOT the library I use now, btw!!!) They decided that it had been lost. I requested they purchase a new copy. No, it was "out of print". Excuse me, but here it is in my homeschool catalog as being in reprint (because hs'ers like it so well!). Then I was told how old this history book was, and how much history has "changed" since then. History has CHANGED??? Added to, yes, but not "changed". Jefferson was STILL president when he bought Louisiana from France. Marie Antionette still lost her head in the French Revolution, and William the Conqueror still invaded England and beat Harold. So WHAT exactly has "changed"?
Glad to hear you are not doing the drop ship thing. I have been a victim of it from many angles. I used to sell online and was kinda used as a dropshipper with out my consent. Caused a bit of a customer relationship issue until I figured out what had happened. Did want to point out that if one purchases more than a certain amount the shipping is free. For example Amazon.com has 25.00 and up orders with free shipping and places like Rock Solid Inc. have 75.00 orders with free shipping. Fortunately you do not have to compete with the likes of Amazon on the price of books. Some folks like customer service that has a phone number and a human involved, as opposed to an automatically generated email repsponce. Shipping is another story, noone likes high shipping prices, making book rate at the USPS a book sellers freind. A real popular model is to have a set shipping and handling on all orders. In this way the person buying a small amount gets a reasonable cost that they know up front and the larger buyer gets the benifit of adding more and more to the cart and not having to worry about shipping.
Drop shipping is when you take orders for an item and collect the money for the item. But you do NOT have possession of the item. You then run to a supplier, which might be as simple as solutions.com and order the item for the customer, having it shipped to their house as if it came from you. You keep the difference in what you charged them for the item and what you paid for it. Many people figure it out and go directly to the source instead of the middle man "Drop Shipper". Then their are the companies that claim to be great drop shipping companies... You might see SMG late at night on infomercials, trying to convince you that you can drop ship their things and make a hefty profit. Of course that means millions of others are trying to sell the SAME stuff on eBay and the flew markets, though, right? Riiiight. Drop shipping is simply creating yourself a job as a middle man. Ripe with tons of problems.
Hi Laja, Thank you for your response. All this information is giving me a better perspective. There's no way we can compete with local thrift shops, libraries, and second-hand stores. We will have to rely on those who don't have easy access to these types of establishments. Good to know the copyright dates are not that important for basic math, history, writing skills, etc. material. I had been concerned some of our books and workbooks were not recently published. Have a great weekend. Sue
Actually Rainbow resource ship free over $150. I personally love Rainbow Resource. I've rarely had to wait for my materials, but that may be because I order in Feb (not in the summer when everyone else orders). There have been a few times when something was on backorder & I had to wait for it, but I don't mind waiting for one or two things. My only issue with them is that that have a limited selection of secular products. Sue, I wouldn't mind the wait. I plan ahead & generally have a few months before our new year starts when I order. I would want my card charged for everything at once, though. I use my debit card, not credit card, for school supplies & I need to know exactly how much is coming out & when, so I can plan bills, groceries, etc. In fact B&N just messed with my account & almost caused a check to bounce, because they don't charge til they ship & they just shipped 2 books I ordered months ago (on top of that they shipped the books separately & charged them separately). My two biggest suggestions would be 1)charge all at once & 2)make sure you have a good selection of secular materials. It's very difficult to find secular materials at good prices. Many places offer Christian materials at discounts, but the secular crowd tends to have to search more.
That's a good point, Brandi! While I lean toward Christian curriculum, there are more and more people homeschooling for reasons other than spiritual. Then there are Christian homeschoolers that just prefer a more secular education. We have people from both of these categories on this site. Perhaps you might find a market for more traditional public school materials. There are some exclusive secular homeschooling boards out there; one of them might give you better feedback as to whether this market would exist.
Hi Vantage, Sorry you had a bad experience with drop shippers. The company I work for already has books in inventory, but I had considered at one time doing a business for myself using dropshippers. The company that hosts our websites really pushed this concept on the poor people at the seminar to get them to buy more websites. It's good to get some feedback on that before I decide to try it myself. I think the only way to get the $25 free shipping from Amazon is to buy the books directly from Amazon and not one of the sellers. I sell books on Amazon and always beat their price by far, but the customer will have to pay $3.99 per book for shipping. I feel bad when someone buys 5 or 6 books from me on Amazon and get charged a huge shipping fee. Our website charges $3.99 shipping for the first book and then $1.00 shipping per additional book. I give a special shipping rate for orders over 15 books, which is actual shipping plus 10%. These orders I have to take over the phone so I can process the credit card manually. We considered offering free shipping for orders over $50.00 and actually did at first, but do not make enough on the markup of our books and $50.00 of our cheap books can add up to alot of weight....it depends on the books. For example, we had a customer order 17 children's thesaurus. The books weighted 4 lbs each and the actual shipping was over $30.00. In the future, if we get enough volume of sales to absorb this kind of loss, we would consider offering free shipping again. This is a learning process for me, with the homeschool book market being entirely different from the discounted book market and the library sales market. I appreciate the feedback. Take care, Sue
Hi Brandi, Thank you for your feedback. It seems that most would rather have their credit card charged immediately and, after reading your post, I can really see why. I too use a debit card for online purchases and, now that I recall, had a similar situation with a pet memorial bench I ordered a few years ago. I can see how that would mess up a customer's account. Perhaps we should just stick with immediate capture and worry about the possibility of having to refund partial or full payment if the ordered items are not available at the publisher if and when it occurs. If we are selective of what we offer, this should not happen frequently. I just get anxious taking money for something I don't have in hand to ship immediately. I hope you will excuse my ignorance, but what is secular material? How is it different from Christian material? If there is a shortage of secular material available at discount, we would make every effort to provide this. Thank you again. You have been most helpful. Sue
Oops....I just found out what secular means. For some reason I thought it meant religious. I guess sometimes the fingers type while the brain is not fully engaged. I apologize if my temporary lack of information offended anyone. I believe most of what we offer is more secular than Christian and, while I have not looked over what is offered by our publishers yet, would tend to believe it will be more secular as well. As is apparent to everyone, our company is not Christian based and has limited experience with homeschooling, outside of one employee's daughter homeschooling her children. At this point I think it would be false of us to portray ourselves as a Christian homeschool website, which is why we are concentrating our inventory for now on basic educational material. I realize the bigger market is for Christian homeschooling books and workbooks and hope we can find a niche that will be profitable for us. Sue
