Notes for Newbies - Part Twenty - Duplication and Fulfilment

By: William Rice-Johnston
Submitted: 2007-01-17 15:10:43
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Hello again

Today we want to talk about duplication and fulfilment. These are two terms that are sometimes confused. They are two different resources you need for your business. Although they are different, they are linked.

Duplication and fulfilment

If you ship any hard products: CDs, DVDs, audio tapes (yes, audio tapes can still be profitable products), printed books, training manuals and the like, you need to have these copied or produced in quantity to fulfil your orders. This is duplication.

The actual process of putting these in envelopes or jiffy bags and shipping to your customers we call fulfilment.

Even if you don’t ship hard products, you will sometimes use duplication and fulfilment to prepare and post sales letters, details of seminar dates and locations, and other offers of interest to your customers.

(There are a few big players in the business who do everything through the Internet and never post or deliver anything through the post. If this is your business model, you may ignore the rest of this article.)

Duplication

When you are new in the business, you will probably do all your duplication yourself. These days it doesn’t cost very much to copy DVDs, DVD covers and sales letters. Most PCs and laptops come equipped with units to copy DVDs. Colour printers are available at reasonable prices.

Keep this in mind: Everything you send out must look thoroughly professional.

Not long ago I received an unsolicited sales letter for a package that was going to make me rich beyond my wildest dreams. The man who wrote this had done it, and so could I.

His letter was a black and white photocopy, and a very poor one at that. He even mentioned in the letter his colour printer was down at the moment. Should I have believed him? Would you have believed him? His cheap-looking letter went straight in the bin.

Here you are going to have to spend just a bit. If you are producing DVDs, I think you need to print directly onto the disk rather than applying a printed label. You can buy a unit to print directly onto DVDs, called a thermal printer, for under ?100.

And if you can manage it on your budget, you can buy a colour laser printer for about ?500. With this you can produce top quality sales letters, DVD covers, training manuals and anything else you are sending out.

The downside of a colour laser printer is the cost of the colour cartridges – they can run to about ?250 or more for a set to print 4,000 A4 pages. But, shucks, if you need to print that many pages, you must be selling something! :-)

Label printing software for your PC will cost you about ?20 – not too bad.

The alternative to doing your own duplication is to pay somebody to do it for you. These businesses are called ‘duplication houses’ and a search of the Internet will give you some leads. There are plenty of them to choose from. When your volume reaches the level at which this is cost effective, ask your guru for the one he or she uses.

Fulfilment

Again, when you are new in the business you will be doing this all yourself. Here my advice is that you buy top quality envelopes. With the label printing software you bought in the paragraph above, you can print mailing labels to produce thoroughly professional looking packages.

Later on when your volume increases, you will want to contract with a fulfilment house to do this for you. Search the Internet and ask your guru.

The really big players in this business never touch either their sales letter or product. They send a copy of their letter and master DVDs to their duplication house and a copy of their list to their fulfilment house. Then they sit back and watch the money roll in. :-)

One thing to remember is that duplication and fulfilment houses are separate businesses. I don’t know of any where the two functions are combined, although there are no doubt some out there somewhere.

That’s all for this time. See you soon.

Next time we shall talk about a number of ways to find products.

Thanks for listening :-)

Copyright © 2006 Mary Rice-Johnston & Golden Goose Direct. All rights reserved.

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