If you are someone who is passionate about childhood education, here’s a business opportunity to consider. Instead of setting up a childcare center or a kindergarten, you can now sell children’s books from home with a minimum investment. In today’s review, we are going to look into Barefoot Books and see how you can use it to start a fun business.
What Is Barefoot Books
This company is an independent publisher, that specializes in creating story books (in English, French and Spanish language), animation, educational games and gifts for children between the age of 1 to 12 years old. Since it is also registered with the Direct Selling Association (DSA), members are allowed to sell their products directly to the public through the ambassador program.
How Much You Need To Get Started
Barefoot provides two types of business kits for you to start as a seller.
- Barefoot Books in a Box – $139.99 (actual value is worth $350)
- Barefoot Books in a Bag $79.99 (actual value is worth $200)
Each kit contains books, catalogs and brochures that can be used for display and product sharing. On top of that, there’s also access to community support, a website storefront and free monthly marketing tools to help with your promotion.
The membership costs $49.99 per annum, but this fee is waived during your first year of joining.
How to Sell The Products
There are generally two ways to go about selling the children’s books. The most common method is organizing home parties, joining community events or book exhibitions. These activities require you to come face-to-face with the public so having a good communication skills would help a lot.
You also need to be very proactive in social planning and networking, especially with individuals who are the key players in the children’s education system.
The second method is to bring your business online. As an ambassador, you are given a referral link that can be used to lead viewers to your storefront and when they purchase the products online, you will earn a percentage of commission from the sales.
Unlike direct selling, you don’t really need to talk to people, but you do need to be active in the online space either through blogging or social media to attract an audience that could potentially become buying customers.
For example, parents nowadays do a lot of online shopping for their children and they tend to research before making a purchase. So when they go on Google, guess what are the phrases that they would use to search?
- How to teach my child to read
- Storybooks for toddlers
- Alphabet phonics for kindergarten
- Benefits of reading with children
- Books for 4 year olds to read
These are just some of the information that a parent would be searching for and they are called keywords, ideas that you can use to write a blog or create a social post to share your views about Barefoot Books products. The best thing is that this type of content stays on the web for a very long time, hence they can continuously drive visitors to your storefront with minimal effort on your side.
How Much Can You Earn
Like most independent businesses, your earnings depend on your time commitment and the techniques that you choose to sell the products. Since Barefoot Books is partly a direct selling company, you earn from selling to the customers and sponsoring new ambassadors.
If you are familiar with the MLM business model, earnings are flexible and calculated in the form of a compensation system. Here’s an overview of what the plan looks like.
- 30% commission on qualifying product sales.
- 15-20% free gift allowance for personal sales.
- 10-15% personal bonus for achieving a minimum sales.
- 4-11% of team members’ sales.
- Leadership level cash rewards, original artwork and vacations.
Is Barefoot Books a Good Business Opportunity
My niece has some of these books and I have to say that the product and content quality is amazing. Printed on hardcovers and glossy surfaces, the stories are beautifully illustrated that aims to deliver positive messages to children. The learning materials come in all formats – CDs, flash cards and apps – which makes reading engaging and fun.
Even though I am not a big fan of direct sales, I like that the company isn’t pushy about their business program and allow individuals to work around their schedule. For example, you don’t need to achieve minimum sales to become an active ambassador.
However, the drawback is that, if you ceased to be active, a certain amount of fees will apply when returning to an ambassador status. Besides that, the program is only available for those residing in the US and Canada.
My other concern is that face-to-face selling seems to be less popular these days. With online shopping up and trending, I find that the program lacks proper training on how to market products through blogging or social media. While I did manage to track down a few of these bloggers, I found their site to be random, brief and not up-to-date.
Overall, I still think that Barefoot Books is a business opportunity worth considering for individuals who love to teach young children and wants to contribute something positive for their community. This is a great niche and I can see a lot of potential to sell children’s books from home, especially in the online space.
I hope this review has given you something exciting to think about. If you wish to learn more about starting an online business, please visit my recommended training platform for more tools and resources.
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Very informative article on Barefoot Books. I think this is actually a really great home business idea. I am also not a fan for direct selling, but I could see this working well selling online. The books look great, and children do love books. I know we had a large supply of different books as my children have grown up. I am also an Amazon book seller, so this could fit nicely in with that. Great idea!
Hi there, with the new commission rates, Amazon Associates only get 4.5% for recommending physical books. Barefoot offers start from 30% and up so there’s a lot of difference in terms of profit. The fact that members are given unique referral links also means that you can run the business using the affiliate marketing technique and earn from the masses instead of subjecting to the typical way of MLM earning.
I find your article very informative, and the good part of this program is that you can benefit from both offline or face to face business and online. In this MLM part of it I that you get commission for qualifying product sales and free gift/allowance for product sales. Is this allowance in cash also?
The compensation plan varies. If you are interested, you can find more information on this page. Hope this helps.
It sounds quite interesting. I never would have thought about selling children books. Why is it necessary to have an initial charge? Is that just so you can sell everything at a higher price? I prefer the selling at home option. It sounds like the far better way to go in my opinion
Hi Edward, the initial charge is to buy your own business kit. It’s like investing on an inventory if you will. Most network marketing will require you to buy some of their products up front (at cost price) and use it to attract new customers when promoting face-to-face.
With Barefoot books, you can choose to sell from home (via home parties) or sell online through your own personal website. Hope this helps.
I never heard of selling Barefoot books online, but it sounds interesting. This would probably work great for the people who enjoy MLM and hosting parties to sell things. Amazon is a huge book seller, so you would definitely have to differentiate yourself if you want to sell Barefoot books to the same audience. I’m sure you could sell them on Amazon as well, but that would reduce your profit and books have a smaller margin of profit.
Thanks for chiming in Melinda, but technically, one cannot sell Barefoot books on Amazon. The company has terminated that business relationship in year 2013 and has since focus on selling directly through their bookstore in Massachusetts, New York (US), Oxford (England), their main website and via their network of home-based sellers.
The main reason is as you pointed out. Big retailers usually sell the books at discounted prices and the company feels that this will devalue what their product is worth to the market.
I never heard of this company but it seems like a legit business opportunity especially for the MLM crowd . I agree that the trend is toward internet selling, especially if you are selling books. Look at all the book stores that have gone out of business – thanks to Amazon – and other online sellers, but it’s a jungle out there and you need to ‘know’ what you are doing if you want to make any money. I listed a product on Amazon, but could never find it. I only went 25 pages deep and gave up. Needless to say, it never sold.