Suggestions and FAQs

The simple answer is, COMPLY with the DMCA Takedown Notice and remove the book from your store. And DO NOT file a Counter-Notice under any circumstances.

The long answer: We respect the intellectual property rights of others and take care to ensure that we abide by all intellectual property laws. As should you.

If you receive a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice, follow these steps:

1. Click the link to view the products that Shopify will be removing. Copy the SKU and the Title of the products that are being removed. If you can, take a screenshot of the page where the original link from the email takes you. This is the list of the products Shopify is removing.

2. Forward us the DMCA takedown notice with the SKU, Titles of the products that are the subject of the notice and the screenshot of the list of the products Shopify is removing to trademark@bookscloud.io so that we may remove the offending material from BooksCloud.

3. DO NOT file a counter-notice. This opens you up to being sued in federal court, even if you have taken down the offending material.

   1. If you did file a counter-notice for any reason, immediately reach out to Shopify via their help chat AND via their email: legal@shopify.com and ask them to withdraw the counter-notice. Provide the ticket ID that is on the bottom of the counter-notice and explain to them that the offending material will not be put up again. The reason to withdraw the counter-notice is to make it less likely that you will be sued by a intellectual property law firm.

   2. As innocent as you are and may feel, there are intellectual property law firms that seek to scare people into settling for large amounts of money through the DMCA. This is the reason for their existence. The counter-notice opens you up to their threats of litigation. Simply comply with the DMCA notice and remove the offending books and DO NOT FILE A COUNTER-NOTICE.

We strive to make sure that every single book in our system is within copyright. Sometimes, bad actors use print on demand services to publish books that get automatically pushed into our system from our network of publishers.

We would simply block print on demand services, but the problem is that print on demand publishing is growing very quickly. Even to the point that the largest publishers in the world use print on demand publishing. It is a convenient way to take less risk printing a book that they do not know will do well, for them to hold less stock or to fill gaps in their stock. And we cannot know when a bad actor is putting copyrighted material up when they do not own the copyright. Usually, they don't even know.

So, the best we can do is remove the books, if they appear.

BooksCloud, and splitShops, Inc. may not be held responsible if you are sued for having content on your website that violates the DMCA. It is your responsibility to remove the content as soon as you are made aware of this content and to NOT file a counter-notice under any circumstances. If we receive a DMCA takedown notice ourselves or from any of the retailers using our service, we will comply immediately and delete the book(s) from our systems and delete the book(s) from every other retailer's store using our app.

We don’t pay a commission.

The way it works is you add books to your store. You make a sale. You collect all of the money from the sale.

BooksCloud gets sent the order right after the sale is made from your website. BooksCloud holds the order for 24-hours so you have a chance to make any changes you want to make to the order. You can submit the order at any time during that 24-hours. Or at approximately the 24-hour mark, we will submit the order for fulfillment.

Right before we submit the order for fulfillment, we charge your credit card for the cost of the book plus shipping.

So, we don’t pay you a commission, but you earn the different between what you charge your customer and the cost of the book plus shipping.

You can set the markup for the books and decide whether to add shipping to the retail price of the book or charge it separately through Shopify's admin.

All books are shipped using USPS Media Mail. UPS/FedEx/DHL may hand-off the package, but the last mile is always USPS.

Therefore, the address provided to BooksCloud must be an address USPS will deliver to.

To check an individual address to see if it is USPS-compliant, you can put it into the USPS Zip Code checker: https://tools.usps.com/zip-code-lookup.htm?byaddress

If you get an error like this, it is not USPS-compliant:

Or it may also not be USPS-compliant if the address is incomplete and you get a response like this:

Best Practices

These are the best practices to maximize the chance your orders will be properly delivered.

In Shopify Admin, go to Settings on the bottom left, then click Checkout. Then, in the Advanced preferences > Address collection, select Validate shipping address:

Then, update your checkout page to tell your customers to use an address that USPS will deliver to.

Right above the Address collection preferences section, there is a Checkout language section, click Edit checkout content.

This button will take you to the Theme Content page. From here you will be able to make changes to these two lines on your checkout page:

We suggest you change this:

to this:

To make this change, scroll to the right to Checkout & system, then search for "delivery" (without quotes). Then scroll down to the Checkout shipping section for Delivery title:

You might change it to something like this:

You might also change this:

to this:

To make this change, search for "address1" (that is address with the number 1, without quotes). Then you will find this section on top:

You might change it to something like this:

If books are sent to addresses that USPS won't deliver to, if/when they are returned to sender, they do not always make it back to our fulfillment center. We can only provide a refund for books that make it back to our fulfillment center in the same condition that they were sent out.

It is your responsibility to make sure the address that BooksCloud is provided is correct and is USPS-compliant. There are apps that verify addresses are USPS-compliant. But we do not recommend any app in particular.

BooksCloud ships to USPS compliant addresses in the United States. This includes:

• all 50 US States

• APO (Army Post Office-US Army and US Air Force) military addresses

• FPO (Fleet Post Office- US Navy and US Marines Corps) military addresses

• US Territories, including:

  • American Samoa

  • Guam

  • Northern Mariana Islands

  • Micronesia

  • Puerto Rico

  • US Virgin Islands

  • Marshall Islands

  • Palau

  • Minor Island

To help ensure that orders only get placed for shipment to the United States, when we sync books to your store we set the Market as United States:

Please do not change this setting.

We do not ship internationally.

Once the order is shipped, we update Shopify with the tracking information so that Shopify can send that information to your customer.

In the BooksCloud Admin, on the Settings page, there is a Price Adjuster. You can edit the Price Adjuster settings to make the markup and shipping as you like.

The default is to have a 1.25 markup. That means that, if the book costs you $10, it will sell in your store for $12.50.

There are two ways to adjust how your customer pays for shipping.

1. On a Per product basis. On the same Price Adjuster page, you can add the cost of shipping to the product price. Shipping costs $7, flat rate. So, a book that had a retail price of $12.50 will be adjusted to $19.50. The effect of setting shipping here is that if your customer orders multiple books they will end up paying $7 shipping for each book. You could set up a Buy X Get Y discount on Shopify to incentivize purchase of multiple books and zero out to additional shipping charges.

2. On a Per order basis. Alternatively, you can set shipping from within Shopify's admin under Settings, Shipping and Delivery, App shipping profiles, BooksCloud, and then adjust the Standard shipping which is set at free by default to any amount you want.

Do not adjust the Shipping zone to be outside of the United States. We only ship to the United States currently.

Please also note that we ship with USPS, so all addresses must be USPS-compliant addresses.

It costs $7 flat rate to ship an order no matter how many books ordered.

All orders ship via USPS. All addresses must be USPS approved addresses.

To automatically add the shipping cost into your retail pricing for each book, visit Settings > Price Adjuster.

Many books ship within 3 days of going to fulfillment. Please keep in mind that orders wait for fulfillment for 24 hours in case there is an address change or cancellation.

Some books are printed on demand. Printing and shipping can take a minimum of 4 days. During peak times and unseasonable weather it can take up to 12 days to ship, but this is rare. Once orders are submitted they cannot be cancelled despite the delay in printing them.

It is hard to know what books are printed on demand because even the largest publishers switch to print their most popular books on demand if their on-hand stock runs low.

24 hours after each order is placed, it is automatically submitted for fulfillment. Your card is charged right before the order goes to fulfillment.

Except, on each order's page, you can

- Submit an order immediately. You will get charged immediately and the order will be sent to fulfillment for processing.

- Set an order to On Hold status. When an order is placed On Hold, it will not be placed until you return to the page and Submit the Order.

- Set an order as Cancelled. That will irrevocable cancel the order. If you want to submit the order after you have cancelled it, you will need to place the order on your store and mark it as paid so it will sync with BooksCloud.

BooksCloud books are shipped on demand. Some books are produced only once ordered. Returns and exchanges are not supported if your customer ordered the wrong book, shipped to the wrong address or simply changed their mind.

However, in case of a damaged book or a manufacturing error, BooksCloud offers a free replacement or a refund if you contact us within 14 days of product delivery. Please get in touch with our team using the support contact link and provide clear photos showing the issue. If there is a damage issue, please also include photos of the packaging.

If there’s an issue affecting multiple of the same products, an additional photo of all affected items visible in one frame will be required for confirmation purposes.

In case of an unsuccessful delivery to the correct address, if 15 days tracking has shown no movement, you can request reshipment to the same address.

In case your customer provides an incorrect address or an address that is not USPS-approved, you may reorder the book(s) from your store with the correct address and mark it as paid. A refund will not be provided.

The return address will be one of our returns center’s addresses.

The name is a vague name:

Your Book Order

Neither. We do not include a receipt. The reason we do this is to avoid confusion. If your customer orders things other than the items we are sending, then the receipt will be incomplete and you will get calls about the rest of the items in their order. So, we simply do not include a receipt.

There will a box with their books.

There are two different ways to add books to your store.

1. INDIVIDUALLY

You can add books individually. Search for each book individually by the SKU, title of the book, or the author.

You can also search for a word that would be in the title of the book. So, if you do not know the name of the books you want to add, you could search for chicken coop and all books with the words chicken coop in their title will appear. If you want to be very specific about the words you are searching for, put them in quotes, like "chicken coop".

Once you have searched you can press the

next to any book and it will be added to your store.

You can see the process of the book being added to your store. It will be removed from the page that found the book, the Available Books page, and it will make its way to the Syncing with Store page and then when we confirm that Shopify has synced the book, it will go to the Books in your store page.

As books get discontinued and are no longer available for sale, they will automatically be removed from your store.

2. BULK SYNC

With bulk sync, you can select an entire category of books and add books in that category automatically without having to touch anything again.

You need to think about the categories that your books might be in. For example, let's say you sell furniture. And you want to add Coffee Table Books and Interior Design Books.

Press Add bulk sync

and then search for coffee table books among the categories of books. Then you can select the current status of the books that will be added. In this scenario, books of any cover type, that are currently in stock, in English and are in the top 10% of best sellers in the Coffee Table Books category will be added.

As books get added to our collection that meet these qualifications, they will be added to your store. As books get discontinued and are no longer available for sale, they will automatically be removed from your store. But, we will not remove books from your store if they fall out of these qualifications. So, if the book is no longer in the Top 10% of best sellers, we won't remove it from your store. Only if it is no longer available from BooksCloud will it be removed from your store.

When your customer places an order it is put on an automatic 24-hour hold to allow your customer to make changes to the order or delivery address. And to allow you to verify that the address is USPS-compliant as we only ship to USPS-compliant address.

Any changes need to be made in your BooksCloud admin for them to take affect. Changes made in Shopify will not update on BooksCloud.

After the order is removed from the 24-hour hold, it goes to fulfillment. It can be removed in two ways, automatically 24-hours after the order is placed or if you place the order in fulfillment on the order page for that for that order.

Once it is in the fulfillment process the order cannot be stopped or changed in any way. The order is being picked, packed and shipped.

Once your order has completed fulfillment and has a tracking number, it will become shipped. The tracking number will be sent to the Shopify and will appear on the order page in BooksCloud.

You can place an order on hold if you do not yet want it to go to fulfillment. This gives you an opportunity to adjust an order at your leisure before it goes to fulfillment. It will not go to fulfillment if it is on hold. You have to come back and submit the order for it to go to fulfillment.

You can cancel an order to prevent it from going to fulfillment. If you cancel an order in BooksCloud it will not cancel it in Shopify. If you change your mind and decide to place the order, you will not be able to take the order out of this status. You will need to place the order again via Shopify and mark it as paid for it to come back into BooksCloud.

If you cancel an order in your Shopify store, you still need to cancel the order in BooksCloud for it to not go into fulfillment.

Occasionally, books cannot be shipped. We will let you know that the order is partially shipped so that you can alert your customer that the order will not ship in full and give them an appropriate discount.

If an entire order is out of stock, we will let you know that the order is not shipping so that you can alert your customer that the order will not ship and give them an appropriate refund.

We are constantly adding new books to BooksCloud. Most of the time, we add them on the week of their release. If you want to know when a specific book will be added, please email us.

If you uninstall BooksCloud, Shopify will irreversibly disconnect the connection between your store and BooksCloud. Every product will be disconnected and they cannot be reconnected. All BooksCloud products in your store will need to be deleted and re-synced.

This is the process you need to take to reinstall BooksCloud:

1. Delete BooksCloud products in your store. To delete BooksCloud products go to the Shopify admin page with the list of Products.

2. Filter your products to only show BooksCloud products. Click the search icon and then select the Vendors drop-down and select BooksCloud.

3. Select all of the BooksCloud products and delete them. Be careful here. Make sure you have selected ONLY BooksCloud products. You don't want to delete all of your products by accident, so take it slow.

4. Unsync all products. Now, we are going to tell BooksCloud that your store has no BooksCloud products in it and have it start the process of syncing the books again. Any Bulk Sync settings will remain in BooksCloud, but individually selected books will not be remembered. You will have to select individual books again and your store will have to go through the process of syncing the products from scratch. Click here and then follow the instructions on the top right of the page.

No, using the BooksCloud platform is free of charge. You can integrate Shopify and publish as many books in your store as you want.

You only pay for the cost of books you sell and shipping when you have sold a book in your store.

No. BooksCloud and our publishers keep stock of the books. We ship them upon your customer's order directly to your customer.

Your store will be integrated with BooksCloud through our BooksCloud app. When an order is placed in your store, the app will tell us that your customer ordered a book. We will charge you for the book plus shipping. Then we will pick, pack and ship the book to your customer.