Drop Shipping

30-Oct-2017: For some time now, we have been planning to offer a drop-shipping arrangement to retailers who run online shops (or who have a mobile shop or a trade stand at a caving event). When your customer places an order on your own web site (or pays you directly at a caving event) we can ship the book to the customer for you, and invoice you afterwards. The advantage to you is that you save on the need to hold stock (and possibly you save on shipping costs too). Plans are still in devleopment, but it might work as described below.

David Gibson, 2 May 2013, updated 30 Nov 2017, reformatted without changes to the text 17-Dec-2020

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How It Works

There could be three different methods of implementing the drop-shipping arrangement.

1. Manual Orders

When you receive an order, you need to email a designated person at BCRA, giving us a delivery address. We will then despatch the order and will invoice you. We will charge you our standard retailer price, plus postage, as described on our web page for Commercial Orders. The "Designated Person" at BCRA will be someone who has a personal stock of the item and can despatch it promptly. At the moment, the Yorkshire Dales book is usually despatched, by courier, within three days of an order being placed.
 

2. Online Orders

The above method is intended to be superseded as we further develop our online shop. The procedure will then be that you go online to our shop and "order" the item yourself. You enter the delivery address as that of your customer, and the billing address as yourself. For payment type you should select "invoice". Then, provided you are a recognised retailer that we deal with, the system will issue all the correct "paperwork" - delivery notes etc - and will inform you and the customer when the item is despatched. The system will invoice you too.
 

3. Orders via a Retailer's Online Shop

If you sell our items via your own online shop, you can arrange for your online shop software itself to place an order with us. This means that there is no additional work involved at your end and all you have to do is to pay our invoices. This method is somewhat technical, and you will need to get your web site designer to do some specialised programming to get it to work. The technical requirements are as follows.

When your online shop software processes your customer's order it should assemble the data that we need - order codes, delivery address and so on, and send this to our web server using an HTTP POST method. The program should then wait for an acknowledgment from our server that the data has been accepted, and act accordingly. When we get to this point in the development we will be able to offer your web designer some example code in the PHP programming language.

Billing Arrangements

Updated 17-Dec-2020: Unfortunately, the current high cost of postage makes it uncertain that any drop-shipping arrangement is going to be feasible. As an example, consider the Yorkshire Dales book. Volume 1 retails for £15, with a 50% discount for retailers, so we can sell it to you for £7.50. However, our postage charges to you (see Commercial Orders) will be £3.00, bringing the total cost, to you, to £10.50. Whether this is feasible depends on what shipping costs you decide to pass on to your customer.

Also, it will not have escaped your notice that BCRA members can purchase this book for £12, postage free. If you, our retailer, are an individual member of BCRA, then you can purchase the book for £12 instead of £15. The salient point is that BCRA members have to pay "cash with order", whereas we would be invoicing our retailers in arrears. However, there is clearly scope for some negotiation here - our drop-shipping idea is in its infancy at the moment, and we are happy to enter into discussions on how it should work and what the charges should be. But the Dales book is a bit of an exception, because the postage is a significant sum and b) BCRA members do pay postage on most other items that we sell.