Managing sale or return stock returns efficiently

Know that feeling when you seal the box and the courier whisks it away only to find another pile of returns in a different hidey-hole? Or worse, an overlooked cache of now past-return-date stock? It is inefficient, and more than that, it hurts your business financially.

Canterbury booksellers were hoping for some special exemptions from returns conditions when their world went pear shaped – twice.

Booksellers CEO Lincoln Gould made an appeal for publishers for understanding and help via PANZ News in early July. Checking out with Scorpio Books whose problems were one of the instigators of the request, Jo Hewitson said that with one notable exception, publishers had been enormously supportive on financial terms but that Scorpio hadn't noted any concessions in relations to returns.

“There are not enough hours in a day, with all we have on our plate, for Dave (pictured at the far right of the Scorpio team below) to go back over old returns. We are rather overstocked as a result, but will have a great sale at the end of this month."

So the message is: ignore returns deadlines at your peril. Bearing that in mind, The Read went looking for booksellers with best practice to get their tips for good stock returns management. We asked reps from different publishers to suggest the most efficient and asked some of those booksellers for advice.

Chris Lumsden at Wanaka PaperPlus is a breath of fresh air. “We try to sell books, not to make returns!

“There are two six month seasons in Wanaka, and if a title isn’t selling in winter, we hold it over and give it a chance in summer and vice versa.”

Chris is happy to tell The Read about a recent example that shows the value of this policy. “We’ve sold 174 copies of Goodbye Sarajevo. For the first three months we did 13, 12 and 18 respectively, the other copies have all sold since then. We later had an event with the authors, but that wasn’t responsible for the rest of the numbers as only 37 sold at the event.

“Goodbye Sarajevo shows the power of recommendations by people who’ve read it, but that can take time. I wouldn’t have got that business if I’d returned it after three months.”

Chris has another insight that should also help booksellers focus on the positive. “Buy more backlist and that will fund your front list.”

As it turns out, most Kiwi booksellers are smart marketers, are proactive and have developed their own strategies so they rarely experience the frustrations described earlier.

Big stores have screeds of computer print out when deciding what to return and what to hold onto; smaller stores who do not have sophisticated systems (a diminishing minority) have hands on staff who are familiar with their stock and are savvy when making the call on keeping or returning paperbacks.

Unsurprisingly, best practice for returns starts the moment the book comes through the door and is entered on the computer. Apart from title, author, price, and category the invoice number and date received or date for returns is noted.

So for Clinton Thompson of Dymocks Newmarket and Greg Brook at University Book Shop Otago, both big, well stocked stores, it is a matter of printing out a report showing all aged stock and heading out to the store to pull returns and putting them in the right bay ready for shipping back to the distributor.

The lists can be lengthy – Greg reckons the one he’s just completed was forty pages.

“And that was a small one!” Decisions of what to return are made on a book by book basis; at the moment stock which will likely sell over Christmas is being retained and other stock cleared to make room for the influx of Christmas titles. Greg uses the sales history of other titles to indicate if stock needs to be returned in full or in part.

Clinton works with Dymocks buyer Gail Woodward (pictured right) to decide which titles will be pulled and which to be retained; sometimes a shelf talker helps promote a book.

He applauds the ‘return cover only’ (for no fault returns) policy of Pearson and Alliance for most of their paperbacks. (The store then disposes the books via recycling).

Sometimes he has to put effort into requesting authorisations. Other hurdles to smooth processing can be returns organised by publication date rather than invoice date, and Scholastic’s confusing differing return date spans for titles.

Because UBS Otago enters the distributor when receiving, there’s no confusion over ‘which distributor do we send this title back to’ – though changes of distributor for an imprint have to be noted.

Naturally both stores take care over packing their returns. “We save all the good boxes for returns and pack carefully so they are received in good condition,” says Greg.

In fact, badly packed boxes of returns are the bane of staff dealing with returns at book distributors, so take note. If they are loosely packed or the box is sent three quarters full and does not have wadding, stock arrives damaged and that’s a needless loss for booksellers.

At Unity Books Wellington, Dylan Sherwood is the assistant manager and the staff member responsible for stock returns. Their approach is a measured one – Dylan pulls all the invoices and checks the sales history before he decides on what stock to cull.

Old formats go when new formats of a title are received– except in Unity’s case that the ‘old’ jacket is preferred by most customers above the ‘film tie in’ ones.

Titles for established back list authors usually stay on the shelves, but first time authors are often harder to sell and end up being returned. (With exceptions for titles staff know they can hand sell – Dylan’s latest favourite is the surfing novel The Life by Malcolm Knox.

Reps tell Dylan that Unity Wellington has a lower percentage of returns than many other bookstores. One reason he puts this down to is giving most titles seven to nine months on the shelves before returning. The other is good communication with the store’s buyers for each area about titles to keep and overstocks to be returned.

For today’s bookstores, SOR is a system that works well, allowing reasonable risks to be taken when a new title or author appeals, and to offer a wide choice of books to customers.

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