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Prime is killing it in Amazon these days. Prime memberships offer a lot of perks, including one that readers love – free shipping on books. Let’s face it, having free shipping is often the key to getting the sale, because who doesn’t love getting something for free?

As you know, our philosophy at Vervante is that you sell from your site, collect the customer data, build your list and make more money. We also understand that selling your book or product on Amazon is desirable and we recommend Amazon Marketplace. In the past, you didn’t have the option to offer free shipping on Amazon Marketplace to compete with products in stock at Amazon (or printed with CreateSpace). Products in stock, fulfilled by Amazon, or printed with CreateSpace qualify for free shipping for PRIME customers. But now, we’ve got a solution for you with the ability to offer free shipping for your products listed on Amazon Marketplace!

FREE SHIPPING
Here’s how it works. You can now choose to offer free shipping to the Amazon buyer.  There are three shipping regions: US, Canada and International. You can give away free shipping to all regions or limit the free shipping to just US buyers. We will charge you for postage to ship the product but you can choose to not charge the Amazon buyer. Here’s an example if you choose not to charge the Amazon US buyer for postage. For those of you who currently have products listed on Marketplace, you will notice in this example that there is no reimbursement for postage from Amazon. (*NOTE: The following numbers are examples only.)


We will then print and ship the book to the buyer and charge you for the transaction:



So in this case you would make $6.60 on this Amazon sale.  Amazon sale of $15.16 less cost to print and ship $8.56 = $6.60 profit.
 
SET THE SHIPPING FEES
You can offer free shipping but you can now also set your own shipping fees for the Amazon buyer. In the past, we didn’t have any flexibility on what the buyer was charged for shipping.   The pre-set shipping fees were:  $3.99 for US, $9.99 for Canada and $16.95 for International.  With the recent changes, you now have the flexibility to not charge for shipping or set your own shipping fees.  

Here’s another example of a book/product that weighs 4 pounds. As you can see, the prior pre-set shipping fees determined by Amazon would not come close to covering your shipping costs to Canada and International locations.



If you currently have products listed on Amazon Marketplace we suggest that you take a look at your Amazon Reconciliation Report.  This is available in your Vervante Author Account under Reports. You can see what your actual postage costs are vs. what you are reimbursed from Amazon. If the current pre-set shipping fees of $3.99 for US, $9.99 for Canada and $16.95 for International orders is covering your actual postage costs, then you probably don’t need to do anything. However, if your product or book weighs more than two pounds you may want to determine the average postage costs for each region and let us know what you’d like to charge the Amazon buyer so that postage costs aren’t dipping into your profit.

In summary, you now have the option of: 

• offering free shipping by not charging Amazon buyers for postage
• leaving the pre-set postage fees for the Amazon buyer as they are now
• changing postage fees based on how much it costs to ship your book/product to each region

If you want to make changes to existing products, please let us know by emailing change requests to customerservice@vervante.com. For questions about how we can help you set up the best sales options for your book, or if you would like a free quote, please drop us a line at sales@vervante.com. Or better yet, schedule a call with one of our publishing professionals at https://vervante.youcanbook.me/.

There are a lot of options for selling your book out there. Let us help you figure out what works best for you.