STL DISTRIBUTION TRADE ANNOUNCEMENT

IBS-STL UK ANNOUNCE NEW AGREEMENT WITH DESTINY IMAGE USA

STL Distribution, the Distribution division of IBS-STL UK, and Destiny Image USA have signed agreements which will see STL Distribution become the sales representative and distributor of Destiny Image USA’s product throughout the United Kingdom and Europe.

Destiny Image USA is committed to publishing biblically sound, prophetic word to the Body of Christ. Their authors are selected for their anointing to direct, encourage and strengthen the church as a whole and include such distinguished, best-selling names as Myles Munroe, T D Jakes and Tommy Tenney

The new agreement means that all Destiny Image product will now be listed on the STL Distribution stockfile and in stock in the warehouse.

Mark Hurley, Business Development director at IBS-STL UK, said, ‘We are delighted to be making the quality Destiny Image USA list more widely and easily available in the UK. STL Distribution offers the UK retailer quick and convenient ordering and the benefits of same day despatch, with carriage free in the UK when an order exceeds £75 at invoice value.’

Don Nori, CEO of Destiny Image USA, said, ‘Destiny Image is grateful for the opportunity presented by STL to make our entire product line available to Europe. We have already doubled monthly sales within the first 60 days! Amazing work! I owe you a great American steak supper!’

To see some of the New and recent Destiny Image titles click here
http://www.stldistribution.co.uk/STLDSite/category/Destiny_Image/

For Destiny Image Europe click here
http://www.stldistribution.co.uk/STLDSite/category/Destiny+Image+Europe/

For further information please contact Mark Hurley at IBS-STL UK, e-mail: mark.hurley@stl.org.

Price reductions on hundreds of American books

Hi everyone,

Following the recent improvement in the value of sterling against the dollar, STL Distribution have reviewed its prices on hundreds of American titles. As a result of this review we have reduced the prices on hundreds of American titles. Click below to see some highlighted American products http://www.stldistribution.co.uk/STLDSite/category/us_price_offers/.

We will continue to monitor the dollar rate with the aim of ensuring that we always have the most competitive prices for our customers.

Warm regards

STLD Blog Team

IBS-STL Trade Announcement

Trade Announcement

There have been a number of rumours circulating suggesting that IBS-STL U.K. is going into ‘liquidation’ or ‘administration’. I can confirm that the charity is neither in liquidation, nor in any form of administration.

A number of factors including the SAP implementation have caused STL Distribution serious Supply Chain difficulties, which have resulted in severe cash flow problems.

I met with a number of our key suppliers earlier this week in London to appraise them of the situation. In addition, the senior team have been seeking external help from our auditors to resolve the current problems.

Yesterday a meeting was held with the Charity’s bankers to discuss our ongoing cash requirements. We are facing significant challenges, but there is no immediate crisis within the Charity. We are working hard to overcome the current difficulties and return to a normal cash position as soon as possible. The Charity, its advisers, bankers and suppliers are working together towards a solution.

I reaffirm my commitment to support the UK Christian trade both in the retail and supply sectors. We continue to work hard as we want to give you the very highest possible levels of service. We remain committed to provide same day despatch, a wide range of resources to choose from, and a stock position that meets your needs. We highly value your on-going trade, support and trust, and pray that as we work together in the months ahead, our activities will continue to impact peoples lives for eternity.

Keith Danby
14.8.09

STL DISTRIBUTION SEARCH – WE’RE MAKING IMPROVEMENTS!

Hi everyone,

Many of you will be aware that our search facility on the STL Distribution website is not as easy to use as you’d like it to be – we couldn’t agree more!

Over the past few months we have been looking at the search facility to make improvements – it’s rather like a cyberspace version of painting the Forth Bridge – it’s never completed but continually being worked on!

We are aware that there are many things that need to be addressed and we are doing as much as we can to improve the search facility, but it is a time consuming manual process. The tools we have for measuring the effectiveness of the search are not particularly helpful or robust so we endeavor to improve things in the following two ways…

We measure search success rates – our search system tells us whenever a person searches for something and doesn’t find what they are looking for. The system tells us that 3 months ago we have a 78% success rate on searched (now improved to 80%).

Trial and error – we look for things and understand why we can’t find something. To do this we need to look for any number of search queries and as you can imagine is an impossible task.

We’re aware that you are using the site daily and have regular frustrations, we need your help! We have set up an email address for you to send us any search problems you have (search.problem@stl.org). I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to drop us an email any time (when practical) you experience a search problem. We will do our best to resolves it as quickly as we are able.

So what have we done to help improve the search? Below are a few things we have done to change the search in order to improve it and a couple of helpful search hints…

We’ve added a publisher field to enable you to refine your search:

We’ve altered the default search to only search titles that are ‘in print’.

For example if you searched for “Adrian Plass” the search offers you 26 titles:

If you then tick the box ‘include out of print’, you see that the search updates to include all Plass titles that are on the system (Eg it add all the titles that are no longer in print).

Taking Plass as an example the main benefit, from this change, is that it reduces the number of lines you need to search through to find what you are looking for. This change should improve the search performance and save you time as you look for the titles you need (in this case there are 33 more titles to sift through to find the title you are looking for).

View book covers in a search

This isn’t new but after speaking with some of you we thought we’d mention that you can choose to view your search as a listing or view covers…

Make use of “…”

When searching for something it’s often beneficial to put quote marks either side of your query – E.g. if you search for the first rainbow the search query pulls up 5 titles where those words are attributable to the search query – it can be any combination of those three words. If you type "the first rainbow" the three titles of that name come up – therefore refining your search

Searching for authors

A Search performs as well as the information that’s in it – often authors names are slightly different on a number of Books – eg GP Taylor, he appears as: GP Taylor, Taylor GP, G.P. Taylor, Graham P Taylor and Taylor Graham P. In this case we have fixed the search query to work on these variants but for many authors there will still be problems – S try different combinations if you struggle to find the title you are after.

By-passing the search

When you can’t find a title in the search and you know the ISBN/product code there is a way of checking if it is actually on the website - you can add the ISBN/code to the website address (URL) to locate the product page directly (sorry going to get a little techy here…). To do this you simply click on any product on the website (doesn’t matter which one) – my example here is the New International Version Pocket Flexibind – once the product page appears the URL shows as follows: http://www.stldistribution.co.uk/STLDSite/product/9780340523308.htm - you’ll see that there product code is there. To quickly get to a product page without navigating the website or using the search you can simply insert any product code into the URL and the product page should appear – if it doesn’t then it’s likely that the product isn’t on the website and we will need to know (please use the search.problem@stl.org email to tell us).