How do you maximise cost savings on postage?
Making sure your books get shipped to your customers at the best possible price is crucial. As you may be aware, shipping costs are often more than the print costs, so reducing these costs can make a huge difference to your overall cost of production and your retail price.
In this blog we share some useful tips and insights, looking at ways you can review your processes and even the final product offering to make it as cost effective as possible, whilst not compromising on the quality.
There are lots of useful guides that have been created. The UK’s main postal provider Royal Mail, has published a comprehensive and practical guide for International mail.
What can you send?
As long as your books fall within the size and weight restrictions outlined below, you can use Royal Mail to send a variety of weights and formats.
These include:
We offer tracked (5 point tracked) or standard (just proof of delivery), and next day (RM24) and 3-4 days (RM48)
Delivery times within Europe are 3-5 working days and the rest of World 6-8 working days.
Post is the most cost-effective way of sending your products. There are more expensive alternatives including tracked postage and courier services, and we’ll talk about these in future posts.
Top tips
Your production company should have in-depth knowledge of the various ways of sending your products and be able to negotiate advantageous rates on your behalf. In the UK for example, there are a number of postal consolidators competing with Royal Mail who are often able to offer more competitive pricing, especially on popular European routes.
Andrew Balcombe, founder of WowBooks, shares some tips on how to maximise potential savings. “Experience and in-depth working knowledge of each country’s postal systems is key as they each have different criteria”.
Andrew’s top tips include:
There are so many variables to consider when it comes to posting and shipping. But it is well worth spending the time looking into all the options available. The savings can be considerable. WowBooks have already been able to achieve considerable savings for customers. These include:
And to sum up
We all recognise that getting your books from the factory to your customer’s letterbox at the best possible cost is critical. It’s one of the essential considerations in the production cycle of personalised books, accounting for at least half of the overall cost of production.
We hope you’ve found this article useful. We’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts or questions about shipping. Look out for future posts on postage and shipping.