hey everybody,

 I ordered 4 books from a member and asked if they would be willing to send 4 additional books free  they are childrens books. (magic tree house all paperbacks they are usually between 68 and 109 pages long) they agreed. I received 4 of the books today in the mail but they were a mixed lot ( 3 of them were the ones I requested with credits and 1 was one of the freebies) Is there a way to mark only some of them received when they show up on my orders page as a shipment?

I contacted the sender:

Hi Member,

I received 4 of the 8 books I requested in the deal from you. Did you mail them in 2 separate envelopes and if so can I wait until I receive the rest of them before I mark them received? Please let me know. thanks for the great deal.

This is the reply I got:

Since you only requested the four books, I could only pay for the four books when I shipped them through PBS. I had to go to the post office and mail the other four books separately which cost me twice as much to ship. So yes, I had to mail them in two different packages. You can mark the four others as received whenever you want. I'm think I might have gotten the short end of this "deal."

 I know she/he wasn't trying to be rude so thats not what i'm wondering. what I'm asking is what would you do? Would you wait until you received all the books before you marked it received or would you mark it received now?

Thanks for looking.
 

I don't know how large these children books were, but she got 4 credits so I'm sure she did not loose money mailing in two packages.  Go ahead and mark the 3 books you ordered as received and just wait for the others to arrive.

I'd only mark received the books you have received so far. The sender agreed to the deal so I don't know why they think they got the short end of the stick. 

Um you may want to inform the sender that she did NOT need to pay two lots of shipping.  If she used PBS postage, you just changed the weight to reflect all the books when printing out the label.  Maybe they did not know this.

I think her comment is rude and would not deal with her again in any way.  Just MHO.  She should have mailed them all together as media mail is by pounds.

I think that you had a misinformed sender. It was her mistake to mail two packages as she would have saved more money on mailing just one.

I'd mark the books that you actually recieved as received and wait until you get the last book. When it arrives, mark it as received.

Yeah, I think she was just really, really confused. I would mark the books that have arrived received and take the time to explain how she might make deals work better for her in the future.

Alternately the sender could have used the mail to a friend feature as I often do which gives them a record on their main account page and adds the weight of the freebies to the pbs postage. Of course they would have had to accept you as a friend first, which could have become another issue.

But they still could have added the extras to the package and paid the additional postage at the post office. If there was any, childrens books don't weigh much might not have raised the price at all. Either way only one package was necessary.

But I am off topic. I would only mark recieved those requested items that have actually been recieved.

Mail to a friend is available to anyone, you don't need to actually have a member as a friend to use it. You can use it to create a label to send to anyone, even non-members. If you're using it for a multiple book order/deal  just type in the same address as the ordered book and the system will recognize the address and create a label and insert (listing all the books in the order). You do need to double check the weight though, especially for those using printed postage, but that's a good idea to check every time anyway. I always use mail to a friend on deals as it pulls the books from my shelf automatically and keeps them recorded in my transaction archive. You just have to mark them received yourself when the recipient marks the actual credit-ordered book(s) received.

Good to know, Linda.  Thanks.

Nancy and Linda are right, I do this all the time when I offer a deal so that the system still tracks the "free" books I mail out. I don't use PBS postage though.

A couple years ago I swapped all our books from that same children's series and you could mail out 3of them  for the same media mail rate as one adult MMPB.