SimpleSource offers a lot of benefits to college stores, ranging from streamlining and simplifying the textbook ordering process to saving stores time and money. It is a complete ordering tool designed for college stores to maximize their wantlist fulfillment – i.e. get more books for a lower average cost.
The tool can be used for wholesale ordering, marketplace ordering or both. Let’s take a moment to look at both options and how stores benefit from this innovative tool.
Wholesale Textbook Ordering
Through SimpleSource, your store accesses a wide array of inventory, including new and used wholesale books at below-market costs.
You can select the percentage of your list that you would like MBS to fulfill through our traditional inventory models. You can then select from the discount tiers which level you would like to start with and choose when the cycles start and end. As fulfillment progresses, you can cycle through pricing tiers, providing access to a greater number of books.
After you set your parameters for your wantlist, SimpleSource will automatically rework your wantlist multiple times a day. This is important because MBS is constantly receiving and processing new shipments of inventory. Therefore, every time your list is reworked, it is compared against all of the available inventory at that moment. If your list is only compared once, your store can only access the available inventory in that single snapshot.
By automatically reworking stores' lists multiple times a day, we have been able to increase fulfillment rates and help lower the average cost for acquisition. In turn, stores have been able to improve their margins and pass along greater student savings.
Some of the other SimpleSource benefits include:
- Immediate access to pricing
- Saving time by not having to submit multiple orders, request individual reworks, streamlined order reconciliation and simplified accounting.
- Better wantlist fulfillment because of auto-reworks
- Simplified marketplace sourcing and access to more off-priced wholesale inventory
- One shipment, one invoice
- Realtime fulfillment updates
Ordering From the Textbook Marketplace
When stores use the textbook marketplace available through SimpleSource, they retain complete control over the books they choose to source, the number of copies they want and what they will pay for those books. MBS will not pay more than what your store indicates for any title.
You can choose to start a marketplace order with just a few harder-to-find titles and observe the real-time fulfillment updates, adding additional titles as you wish. Or, you can start with as many titles as you would like.
The main benefit to stores is the SimpleSource marketplace helps lower their overall costs even further. Between May and August 2021, stores using the marketplace had an average discount of 74 percent off of SRP — a 2 percent increase over the previous year.
If you have never used marketplace for sourcing, contact your MBS representative for help getting started.
Some of the SimpleSource marketplace benefits are:
- A greater cost reduction
- Access to more off-priced wholesale inventory
- Saving time over sourcing from the marketplace yourself
- Books are vetted for authenticity
- The marketplace books are included in your invoice, simplifying the necessary accounting
- You receive all of your order (wholesale and marketplace) at once – Not multiple shipments with multiple invoices
- You also have the option to create a separate marketplace order if you want separate invoices
If you would like more information about SimpleSource or help getting started, just contact your MBS representative today.
