>It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!).
Looking at your site, the first thing I noticed is that you use AusPost (I'm assuming you'd be paying MyPost Business rates).
Especially for larger packages within the same city, Sendle generally has better rates and turnaround times.
Have you looked into alternative logistics options?
>>We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books.
Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.
> Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.
Sorry, I missed this.
We've discussed this and I'm keen to give it a go in some form or another. If we continue to grow I think it'll become a necessity. However, each month has a unique theme that's consistent across the 4 age brackets. So we can't necessarily send out previous month's stock as it won't match the month's theme.
What we have started doing though is selling one-off bundles in addition to our subscriptions. These are selling reasonably well considering we haven't really pushed them. So I think we may be able to offer past subscription bundles in a similar fashion. The only thing that gives us pause is that we've noticed other book subscriptions have attempted this and had issues clearing out their excess stock. Whether that's a reflection on their product, their website, or the fact people just aren't interested in "old" stock, I'm not yet sure.
We've looked into this quite a bit actually. Auspost did work out the cheapest, at least initially. However, Auspost's recent price increase was particularly painful. Children's books have fairly large dimensions, so our pricing is largely dictated by parcel size, rather than weight.
I can't remember whether this factored in, but we are ourselves reasonably remote. Technically Melbourne, but not really. So I think the typical advertised rates aren't always accessible to us.
It doesn't help that Auspost recently implemented some sort of automated parcel measuring/weighing and it's incredibly wrong. We use the exact same box for every single delivery, yet we randomly receive bills to our business account claiming we've underpaid postage due to the odd parcel supposedly fluctuating in dimensions, by over 10cm in some cases!
Needless to say, we will definitely be revisiting this again. Will for sure check-out Sendle again. Thanks!
Looking at your site, the first thing I noticed is that you use AusPost (I'm assuming you'd be paying MyPost Business rates).
Especially for larger packages within the same city, Sendle generally has better rates and turnaround times.
Have you looked into alternative logistics options?
>>We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books.
Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.