Did you know that Mothergooseberry Books began donating 100% of its profits to Christian ministries around the world in August, 2020? We consider it as a way to minister when we cannot “go into all the world” ourselves. Now, while that may encourage some to shop to help us spread the Good News, it may discourage others who would prefer that we consider ourselves strictly a business rather than a ministry. But it explains some of our “business practices” of watching our expenditures closely.
Mothergooseberry Books website was actually born many years after we already had an online presence…on eBay! Our eBay name is “familybookstore” that we have been using since 1998! Long before our own website was even born! We keep many of our best inventory items listed there, but are limited to a certain number of items per month unless we pay additional “listing fees” (see the above paragraph!), so we remove some items when the month nears the end to keep from spending those extra fees and cut into the profits that we can donate.
We also have a newer online presence on a site called “Mercari” with the seller name “Mothergooseberry” and that site has no such limits. That means that almost our entire inventory is listed there–and has been selling like hotcakes since we began listing inventory in late 2020. Since Mercari only began (in April, 2023) offering “media rate” as a shipping option, we were paying ALL SHIPPING COSTS on books sold on that site with those costs built right into the selling price. That’s why you will notice the difference in selling prices from our online website, on eBay, and Mercari. But we felt that we could not in good conscience sell books which could only be shipped with very expensive “priority” rate shipping. We simply opt to ship on our own at USPS Media Rate…less than half the cost of Priority rate.