Books - dropshippers needed

I would appreciate any assistance with book dropshippers. There are several in the directory, however, none of them have a good range of book titles. There is one good children's one, but if anyone knows of one with a wide range of categories as well, it would be much appreciated.
Also, for some reason, the book dropshippers want to charge a membership fee. It is not something that i like, i would prefer them to charge a small handling fee on each purchase.

Hi rexy5,

Welcome to SaleHoo :)

Here are previous posts with book suppliers that may be able to help you with your needs -

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Some of the drop shippers in our directory do charge small account set-up fees.

While by no means ideal, a small account set-up fee is fairly common practice among drop shippers. In most cases we can understand the charge because it costs the drop shipper time and money to process a new account.

That said, not all drop shippers in SaleHoo charge a fee. And even if an account set-up fee is charged, you can often get around it by purchasing through the wholesale area of the site rather than the drop shipping area.

Hope this helps :) Please let us know how you get on.

Hi Richelle,

Thanks for your reply. I had already gone through all the old threads, but just thought i would see if anyone had any new suggestions.

The way the publishing and distribution businesses work for books, I'd seriously doubt that there are many (perhaps any) dropshippers of in-demand titles. Almost anyone dropshipping is either self- or boutique-publishing the stuff they're selling (and that's a great business model, but severely limits choices) or selling liquidated stock that they bought in bulk (which is also a great business model but severely limits the possibility of a reliable, replaceable supply.)

As some here know, books are my main niche; I've been selling them seriously for more than seven years and spent a few years prior to that testing various approaches to procuring stock and moving it back out. As was suggested in one of the above-linked threads, libraries and other secondhand sources can be outstanding and affordable places to build an initial inventory, if you want to look at inventorying and selling vs. dropshipping.

The per-unit price and rapid depreciation of most books' potential buyer base make them a very unattractive product from the standpoint of the dropshipper. Even selling classics, which tends to take care of the demand problem, won't fix the price problem, and lack of margin = lack of a reason to bother dropshipping it.


Frank

To be clear, I'm not simply dismissing you and telling you to give up --just saying that the target market isn't always what it seems. When you say "Good range of titles" that could mean many things of course; however, if you're looking for a low/no cost dropshipper of say the current NYT bestseller lists, you're just spinning your wheels. Standard wholesale for books is 55% of retail, typically sold on net 10-30 terms for retailers, some with buyback credit. Given that Amazon sells new titles for anywhere from 5-30% off of retail, there's just no "room" in there for an added layer of profit-taking, ie. there's not enough profit to be split between a dropshipper and a seller, for most parts of the business. Classics, or really anything on which the copyright has expired, can be affrodably self-published and dropshipped; some kids' stuff that is produced on licence is done the same way (ie. a company gets a character licence for say Dora the Explorer, then has a bunch of colouring books, popup books, sticker books etc. mass-produced in China and shipped to the US. Theoretically there's plenty of room for dropshippers there, since the product is being sourced at a much lower cost relative to the wholesale cost of books in the incumbent publisher-distributor system.)


F.

Thank you for the information snd explanation. As usual i just try and start by jumping in boots and all, when i should try a little more finesse.
I will have to go and absorb the information you have given and think about my best way of action.

Rexy

Every market is like that -- you really have to get in and look around, try a few things and see what works. The classic example in selling online is the guy who goes broke trying to sell iPods, vs. the guy who makes a good living selling iPod screen covers. The "visible demand" market is usually the one with the most competing sellers and tightest supply pool. With books, that would usually mean your high-demand bestsellers. But look at the movie market and other forms of media. Has some timeless classic recently been made into a movie or television show? Get some prices on printing up some from Penguin, add some artwork sourced off of DeviantArt or Freelancer.com*, sell them for next-to-zero markup, then upsell your customers on bookmarks, reading glasses, tote bags, Kindle gift certificates, copies of the older movie version of the same book, whatever you can source really that ties into the main product.


Frank

*added note to concede that yes, it's slightly more complicated than that, but if any work is no longer covered by copyright, the only thing preventing you from just publishing your own copy is your own hesitation. Self-publishing a classic book is a fairly straightforward process, and you can have a finished product available with very little out of pocket, thanks to an abundance of "vanity publishers" who have sprung up in the last couple of decades. Margins on the products, unless you are buying them in quantity, will tend to be vanishingly small to just-barely-covered-the-shipping -- but what those products do, is get you a list of people whom you know for a fact buy things online, like a certain kind of book, etc. and the upsell/repeat business is what you're really targeting.