How to Earn Money as a Living Water Sales Representative

Sell books and bookstore materials as a Sales Representative of Living Water Christian Books & Materials (hereafter "LW"), and earn 50% of the net profits from each order you deliver.

Here are the details:

Primary Purpose:

LW is primarily a Christian retail bookstore sales and services company offering discount prices for new Christian books and bookstore products to churches, groups, and individuals. All sales receive a discount off suggested retail prices (also called SRP, or list prices). Products include Bibles, books, Sunday school curricula and materials, and other published materials distributed in Print, Electronic, CD, DVDs, Video, and Tape media. We use the phrase "in print" to mean "available in any of these media". We have established wholesale accounts with distributors and many publishers of Christian materials, and have discount terms with them.

Secondary Purpose:

LW is secondarily a retail bookstore sales and services company offering discount prices for new secular books and bookstore products to businesses, groups, professionals, students, and other individuals. We will endeavor to sell products in this area provided there is no conflict with our Christian business and practices. We have established wholesale accounts with distributors and many publishers of these materials, and have discount terms with them.

Mission:

Our Mission is to promote and encourage the spread of the Word and Good News of Jesus Christ by offering lower than retail prices on all sales, eliminating or reducing shipping and handling charges, and providing free or reduced cost delivery whenever possible.

Profession of Faith:

In order to demonstrate a commitment to Christian principles and values, employees and representatives of LW, whether full time or part time, are expected to be Christians. This means expressing religious belief in and acceptance of Jesus Christ as one's personal Lord and Savior.

Pricing Policy:

LW’s discounting policy is to give one half of whatever discount we get from our suppliers back to our customer as their discount. On most books (called trade books, such as paperbacks, etc) available in bookstores, that comes out to about a 20% discount for the customer. College texts are usually priced higher by publishers, sold at full price by bookstores, and usually have smaller discounts than trade books. LW will faithfully follow our discounting policy with every book we sell. This means that if we locate a bigger discount, the customer gets the benefit.

Net Profit:

Net profit is defined as the amount of money generated from a sale, after deducting the costs of making the sale. Costs include but are not limited to LW’s cost, shipping or postage to LW or its customer, (re)packaging and/or materials, searching for or locating an item, applicable taxes, and other reasonable administrative expenses.

For example, if LW sells a book that normally retails for $80.00, you will earn $8.70 as follows:

LW cost at 35% discount is $52.00.

We offer the books for sale at $64.00, a 20% discount off retail.

Gross margin at this point is $28.00

Deduct shipping cost of $5.60 (Assuming 7% of retail for UPS ground, 3-5 business days).
Deduct drop shipment charge of $5.00 (a drop shipment is sent by our supplier directly to the customer, bypassing an extra shipping step to LW, and may incur this extra charge).
Deduct for other charges from distributors, wholesalers, and publishers, as necessary.
Deduct for sales tax if applicable. We believe that there is currently no sales tax applied to Internet sales; we will correct this if we turn out to be mistaken.

The net result after deducting costs in this case is $17.40

One half of $17.40 is $8.70.

LW will endeavor to increase customer discounts by absorbing some of the costs for shipping, handling, fees, etc. as described above, on a case by case basis. Information in this document is presented for example purposes only, and is not a guarantee of expected income. Earnings are dependent on the performance of the LW representative, and sales volume attained.

Sales Procedures:

Communication:

As an Internet based company, we have found that it’s effective to communicate with via e-mail. Written communications regarding the details of titles, ISBN numbers, publisher names, author names, prices, and so on are much more reliable than voice calls or messages. Of course, voice calls are helpful, but we will expect to generate a follow-up email in every case, as a matter of good business practice and record keeping. Our email address is save@livingwater-books.com, and is available as a hyperlink located at the lower right of every page on our website: www.livingwater-books.com.

You are Surrounded by Customers

At your college location, every student is a potential customer and beneficiary of discounting for books, obviously at the beginning of the term, but also to a lesser degree throughout the year. Please remember also to consider another part-time activity: visiting churches and introducing LW’s discounts and services to them. You will receive the same commission on their typically larger orders for Sunday school curricula and other book needs. We serve all denominations.

Why Living Water Succeeds

As a sales representative, it’s important to understand that you “are” Living Water to your customers, and their point of contact into the company for all their needs. It’s your responsibility to advise the customer about a book’s availability, pricing, discount, delivery time and method, our return policy, and payment options. You will handle all their questions, take their orders, payment, and deliver their books. You will provide a high level of service before and after every sale, and your customers will come keep coming back to you because of that. You will never need to advertise, because word-of-mouth will do that for you.

We will Support You and Help You Succeed

If you provide us the following information about a book, we will be able to report to you if we can get it, and what reduced price the customer will pay.

Title The name of the book, with subtitle if applicable.

Author first name and last name, co-authors if applicable.

(for CDs, DVDs, etc, use artist name)

Publisher (for CDs, DVDs, etc, use the name of their group or movie studio)

ISBN number on book back cover, usually associated with a bar code.

This is a 10-digit number with hyphens in it.

Easier: send the correct digits without the hyphens.

Retail price What the seller asking for the book.

Other information to keep in mind:

Hyperlink If you can send us a hyperlink to this book we may be able to get all the above information from that, and save you the effort.

Condition We prefer to deal with new books. In some cases they may be returned if unused and in saleable condition. The customer pays you to ship returns back to LW, and obtains any refunds from you.

In some cases we might be able to get a used book. If so, we will tell you that and your customer can decide if he/she wants it. Used books are not returnable.

Payment LW will accept orders and payments for book sales only from you, so you are the middleman between us and your customer. This is why you earn a commission on every sale. We strongly urge you to obtain prepayment from your customers so that you can keep up to date with us. You can usually explain to our customers that our discounting practices and our high level of service make LW unique in the industry, and because of that most people are willing to prepay without any problem. As a sales rep, your first order to us must be prepaid; after that we will be happy to take your orders and deliver them with an invoice. Invoiced amounts are due on delivery. We have found it useful to accept your payments by PayPal (see our website for more info), and we can also pay commissions directly to your PayPal account. If you prefer we will be happy to accept your checks, and pay you with LW checks. Unfortunately, we are not able to do direct deposit for you.

Delivery We will deliver only to you at your own address, then you can deliver in person to your customers. Your address can be your home address, college address, or any other residence address. This way you are in complete control of all orders and deliveries, and you know the status of all orders at all times. For your own convenience, we suggest you keep a diary of sales, orders, payments made, payments received, deliveries, receipts, and email messages.

We usually use United Parcel Service for deliveries and returns because they track all orders, unlike the U.S. Post Office. UPS policy is to deliver only to a residence or business address, not a post office box. The exception to this is that they will deliver to a college mail room, who will then put a notification in your mail box.

We hope this information helps you in deciding to become a sales representative for Living Water. We look forward to supporting you with professional service and transactions. We hope you will be able to make a lot of sales, and a lot of money. We offer you generous commission terms because we want you to have the incentive to do well at discount selling, to enjoy it and to want to continue doing it. We understand that in time your customers will move on and then we hope they will want to order directly from us. So, the theory is that you get the commissions initially, but we get the customers long term.

Thank you for considering Living Water. We have found it to be a lot of fun, and a chance to meet more good people (Christians and potential Christians) than we ever thought possible. It gives us an opportunity to serve the Lord by serving others, and that is really satisfying.

Please contact us soon if you have any questions, or if we can be of further help.

Thank you for coming to Living Water.

In NH 603-432-8467 E-Mail: save@livingwater-books.com

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