Buying (& selling) a complete series

[Njr Scrawl]

JPQueen sells complete Japanese manga series as sets, I've bought several, & wondered if any domestic retailer might consider doing the same here for whole or even half series.

IIRC, only Chobits & Nausicaa have been sold as sets. If finished series were marketed as 1 or 2 items, at an overall lower price per volume, I would be more tempted to get a title than shopping around Amazon, Animenation & ebay trying to find missing volumes.

Sets work for anime, why not for manga? Also retailers might be able to compile & vend individual low sellers that way. Ebay often has sales of a whole series.

[Collectonian]

Some online ones do. JustManga, I know, sells sets of completed series with a little extra discount off the already discounted prices. I believe Robert's Corner store sometimes does as well.

One reason brick & morters are unlikely to sell as sets is because then they'd have to keep them all in stock, and a lot don't have enough room on the shelves to keep more than one copy of each volume on the shelf. So if they do sell as a set, one sale and they are out of all volumes and lose the sales from customers needing their "missing volumes."

I do agree with the idea, though, especially for shorter series (up to 6 volumes, maybe up to 8). The main place I'd expect to see it, though, is the online retailers who have more room for stock and better flexibility with how they sell stuff.

Oh, and Cardcaptor Sakura was sold as sets, albeit 2 sets for the first half. I don't remember if the second half was ever sold as sets as well.

[Noodle]

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Wrath of the Njr said:
JPQueen sells complete Japanese manga series as sets, I've bought several, & wondered if any domestic retailer might consider doing the same here for whole or even half series.


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Domestically, this is more likely to be determined by the publisher, not the retailer. But Tokyopop has done some reduced-cost sets bundles--Escaflowne, for example. Something like 25$ for 5 volumes. There were a couple others too, but memory does not serve at the moment. /images/graemlins/sweat000.gif They've done collected boxes too, but not at a reduced cost (.Hack, Cardcaptor Sakura, Peach Girl etc).


PS: I'm going to move this to the Manga News/Info forum, as this isn't really about content and thus not fitting for Views/Rec.

[quenelf]

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Noodle said:
Domestically, this is more likely to be determined by the publisher, not the retailer. But Tokyopop has done some

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But the sites that do this aren't doing anything special - they just send you all the books. They're not in a box or anything (maybe wrapped together inside a plastic bag, that's it). It just saves you time clicking 'add' on multiple individual volume. (In the case of jpqueen, IIRC they sell used manga, so they *only* sell the whole set together; but some ordinary stores selling new manga offer a 'buy whole set' option.)

There isn't any reason why US specialist online stores shouldn't do this. It's not really all that big a deal though, imo...

--quen

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Noodle said:
But Tokyopop has done some reduced-cost sets bundles--Escaflowne, for example. Something like 25$ for 5 volumes.

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That's the first thing that sprang to mind as a response to this thread. I haven't really seen any others, and I've only seen that Esca set in one place (Waldenbooks). However, I don't understand why it's just volumes 1-5 instead of the entire series. Isn't Escaflowne an 8 volume series? I don't think it woulda been too much to include those last three volumes and up the price a bit.

[Noodle]

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quen said:
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Noodle said:
Domestically, this is more likely to be determined by the publisher, not the retailer. But Tokyopop has done some

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But the sites that do this aren't doing anything special - they just send you all the books. They're not in a box or anything (maybe wrapped together inside a plastic bag, that's it). It just saves you time clicking 'add' on multiple individual volume. (In the case of jpqueen, IIRC they sell used manga, so they *only* sell the whole set together; but some ordinary stores selling new manga offer a 'buy whole set' option.)

There isn't any reason why US specialist online stores shouldn't do this. It's not really all that big a deal though, imo...

--quen

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Oh, I understood Njr's point in all that .. I was just pointing out that most stores aren't going to do that because they'd lose money themselves, but on the other hand, TP has bundled a few things already, presumably to unload a poorly selling series.

And actually Jpqueen does sell manga separately, not *only* in sets .. I know because I buy from them.. quite often.

[quenelf]

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Noodle said:
Oh, I understood Njr's point in all that .. I was just pointing out that most stores aren't going to do that because they'd lose money themselves, but on the other hand, TP has bundled a few things already, presumably to unload a poorly selling series.

And actually Jpqueen does sell manga separately, not *only* in sets .. I know because I buy from them.. quite often.

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Oh? Sorry, I haven't bought from them for a few years.

As for losing money, why would they lose money? There isn't a discount, or at least not much of one. If you can make money selling individual books for $8 each you should be able to make money selling a set of ten for $80 (or even offering a slight discount).

--quen

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quen said:
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Noodle said:
Oh, I understood Njr's point in all that .. I was just pointing out that most stores aren't going to do that because they'd lose money themselves, but on the other hand, TP has bundled a few things already, presumably to unload a poorly selling series.

And actually Jpqueen does sell manga separately, not *only* in sets .. I know because I buy from them.. quite often.

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Oh? Sorry, I haven't bought from them for a few years.

As for losing money, why would they lose money? There isn't a discount, or at least not much of one. If you can make money selling individual books for $8 each you should be able to make money selling a set of ten for $80 (or even offering a slight discount).

--quen

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Actually, those bundles are at a lower (re: discounted) total price. Stores would be losing money by selling those as opposed to selling the regularly priced individual releases.

[You]

I don't think stores actually lose money when selling discounted bundles, I think sometimes stores prefer to lower their price ( hence lower their profit ) but sell a large quantity of books. I work like that as well, when somebody wants to make a purchase I tell him the prices and I also tell him that if he buys a bundle of products, or a larger quantity of the same product, I can make a discount.
That's what wholesale is all about basically.

[quenelf]

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mifuneral said:
Actually, those bundles are at a lower (re: discounted) total price. Stores would be losing money by selling those as opposed to selling the regularly priced individual releases.

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The publisher bundles might be, but stores are perfectly free to set their own prices for bundles they make themselves, which is what we're talking about.

From BK1 (new books; used to sell whole-set 'bundles', though I'm not sure their current site does any more), if a single volume cost 390 yen, and there were 10 volumes and you wanted to buy them as a set, it cost 3900 yen /images/graemlins/happy.gif

JPQueen (used) currently sells single volumes for $4.90 and a set of four for $15.90 (same series, same condition, although only books 1 and 4 were available as singles) so there is a decent discount there against the $19.60 combined price.

But it's not required. If you're bundling up manga to sell together, as a store you have the option of offering no discount, or a small discount, or whatever. I'm sure you could offer, say, a $1 discount, without reducing profitability - selling larger orders reduces costs on order fulfilment.

--quen

[eugene_cheng]

I believe that Rayearth was also offered as a set.

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You said:
I don't think stores actually lose money when selling discounted bundles, I think sometimes stores prefer to lower their price ( hence lower their profit ) but sell a large quantity of books. I work like that as well, when somebody wants to make a purchase I tell him the prices and I also tell him that if he buys a bundle of products, or a larger quantity of the same product, I can make a discount.
That's what wholesale is all about basically.

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Stores would only benefit from that mentality if they have adequate volume to compensate for the loss.

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quen said:
The publisher bundles might be, but stores are perfectly free to set their own prices for bundles they make themselves, which is what we're talking about.


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Is it? It's possible the original thread of this conversation has been lost awhile ago.