CreateSpace - Amazon DVD Sales

CreateSpace will kick out DVDs on demand to sell at Amazon.com or in their own store (or heck, mailed to you to sell yourself) for you for $4.95 each as the base creation price. If you read my page on Creating your Own DVDs, you could make the same product for $1.70 each. However, that means you're sitting there burning and printing and building DVDs, and then having to deal with shipping them. In essence you're paying CreateSpace the extra money so they take care of all that hassle for you.

Really the main advantage is that they are creating these DVDs on demand and they are doing all the promotions and sales traffic for you.

Selling the DVD

When you sell via the CreateSpace site - which gets a fair amount of traffic - you are hoping that random visitors to their site will find and buy your DVD. CreateSpace charges you 15% commission (which is rather low for a sales site) and they create the DVDs there for you and ship them. So it's zero stress, zero hassle and you get the checks.

If you charge $12.99, that means they get $1.95 as their commission - plus the $4.95 as the DVD creation fee. So you get $6.05 per sale. Less than the $9 or so profit you'd make doing it yourself, but they are doing all the work for you. You're not out buying DVDs, buying cases, and sitting at your computer all afternoon burning DVDs. You also aren't dealing with grumpy buyers when you are away for a long weekend and come back to pending orders.

On the down side, few people "roam CreateSpace" looking for things to buy. So you probably won't get more buyers than you did on your own site.

The best solution is to get your DVD into Amazon's system so that the entire Amazon world can search for and find your DVDs to buy them. A key advantage of CreateSpace is that they are owned by Amazon so DVDs made by CreateSpace automatically appear in the Amazon system. Let's see what the pricing looks like there.

Amazon takes a 45% commission. Most bookstores take a 50% commission - heck most *stores* take a 50% commission - so that might seem high to the uninitiated but is actually quite normal. So back to our $12.99 model, that means they take $5.85 as their share. Then you pay the $4.95 as the creation fee. So for the sale, you get $2.19 in your share. Realize that when real books sell, the average author only gets maybe 50 cents or a dollar from the publisher. So this range of price isn't unreasonable. On the other hand, publishers usually do promotions for you - and in this case you are doing your own promotions. You can hike the price, but how much will people really pay for your DVD? You can do research and try to boost the price higher, if you think it can sell for that level.

Another option is to have Amazon sell DVDs that YOU make, rather than having them make them on demand. This is back to the pain of you stocking items in your home, burning DVDs and shipping them off to Amazon to store in their warehouse. So while you wouldn't pay them $4.95, if we start with that $1.70, you have to add in your shipping cost to get the DVD *to* Amazon. If you send them 10 at a time it might work out to a low per-unit price. If you send them one at a time, the benefit goes down quickly. Still, in my case, CreateSpace only offers pretty boring paper and case. I can make a much nicer product available by making it myself, which might generate more sales and generate a higher purchase price that people were willing to pay.

Here's another thought. You can create a free Amazon marketplace account. The DVD must be in their system in the first place, which will happen if you create it via CreateSpace. So you create one in CreateSpace. List it at a high price. Then you offer a lower price version via Marketplace, which shows up in the Amazon listing. You now only pay 15% commission on it - so that is the $1.95 - and you get the rest, including money for shipping. You now are responsible again for creating and shipping the suckers from your home but you have the benefit of the huge Amazon marketing system promoting your DVD. And you can make much prettier DVDs than they can. So for a $12.99 starting price, you're getting in a profit of about $9 again, all told. With the DVD in a much, much larger system hopefully generating far more sales. The only real downside is that you are showing up in the "also in used and new" category to the right of the main listing. So your pretty version isn't the main listing - it's something people have to click on to see.

Note that CreateSpace will "give you a free UPC" but you can only use it through them. They retain ownership of it. I really recommend getting your own UPC so that you control it. That can run you $100 for the first one and $85 for subsequent ones, if you go through most online services. Read up my page on UPC Numbers and DVDs.

Why Not Just Sell with a Non-Amazon Store?

I've actually sold books for many years with Amazon and own BellaOnline which gets over 20 million pageviews a month. So we have done a ton of experimenting with using different vendors, different buy style buttons, and so on. I definitely appreciate the better cut of non-Amazon stores, and I want to support small business. However, we have seen overwhelmingly that if we provide a link to an unknown shop vs a link to Amazon that people buy in droves from Amazon and they rarely if ever buy from the unknown shop. The number difference is phenomenal.

There are all sorts of reasons for why of course - that they have an account already in Amazon perhaps, or maybe they feel Amazon looks more professional, or maybe they have friends who have used Amazon so when they see the name they trust it, or maybe they were going to buy other things at the same time and Amazon had the other things too. But for whatever reason (or perhaps for all of those reasons plus many more) if the link is to Amazon, sales go through the roof. If the link is to a non-Amazon store, it is a struggle to get people to buy even one. These experiments were done for the exact same item, many times, so it was definitely an equitable situation.

I wouldn't get a Marketplace account if I wanted to sell through Amazon, I'd just create the DVD via CreateSpace which is the Amazon-affiliated DVD system and they would get it into Amazon's system automatically. However I really dislike the DVDs that CreateSpace creates. I have the same problem with the books they create; the size is wrong on the books. Amazon is doing a cool thing by offering this print-on-demand option incorporated right in their system but their options are rather poor. CreateSpace is free to set up.

As confusing as it sounds, I may sign up with DVDBaby, get the UPC and start sending the DVDs to them (I put a lot of work into making attractive DVDs with textured paper covers and colored CD cases) - and once I have the UPC from DVDBaby I can then go on CreateSpace and create the DVD entry there for free. That means my DVD shows up in the Amazon system pretty much immediately. Then I can wait for DVDBaby to catch up and get the entry updated - which could take a few months. At that point I can shut down the CreateSpace account since their CD creations are ugly anyway, and that would just leave the DVDBaby account, with the proper UPC, live in Amazon, and the DVDs will be the pretty ones I am making. The only catch here would be how that "transition" occurs - i.e. what happens if Amazon has an entry for my UPC code already because of CreateSpace and then the DVDBaby comes in with the same code, from your system. Hopefully the DVDBaby will override since it's the newer one.

If it wasn't the holidays I would just wait, but this could sell well during the holidays and it seems silly for me to miss out on that timeframe because of Amazon listing delay issues ...

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