If anyone is interested in store related stuff, Brian Hibbs wrote a thing about Diamond's shipping practices earlier this month:
comicsbeat.com/tilting-at-windmills-275-diamond-and-graphic-novel-distribution/
Specifically, it goes into what discounts he gets as an LCS, and ends up giving some insight into how IST can price their stuff.
>Diamond’s structure of how they make money is also a real problem — see, they never made money “just” from the distribution of goods, but also from many policy-level “hidden” charges. For an example: Diamond has a 3 percent “reorder penalty” for, well, reorders. This sort of makes sense when you look back 30+ years when periodicals solely ruled the world
>Now, this can be sub-rosa for a lot of stores because the “brokered” publishers (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, Boom!, Dynamite) are paying these fees (or some equivalent) on the retailer’s behalf, but every time a retailer orders, say, a Scholastic book from Diamond, instead of getting the listed 45 percent discount, they’re actually only getting 42 percent
>OK, as a “for example”, let’s look at BookScan’s #1 book of the year: Dog Man. It is published by Scholastic, and Diamond has Scholastic as an “F” discount publisher. This means the base discount was 45 percent. BUT, there’s the 3 percent reorder penalty that we talking about, so that drops effective discount to 42 percent. And, as noted, my shipping looks to be 6 percent of wholesale, so my effective discount effectively becomes 36 percent.
>But the thing is that that once you’re up to the point where you’re placing rational size reorders (usually as little as just 10 or 20 pieces), it starts becoming absurdly more cost-effective to buy direct from “bookstore” sourcing. Let’s take that example of buying Dog Man — buying non-returnable from Scholastic is a straight 50 percent off cover. Period, the end. And they charge no shipping.
