Bulk Purchase Program
Professionals can buy PainScience.com ebooks in discounted batches and then distribute or re-sell them to clients/students
PainScience.com mostly sells tutorials (e-books) to individual patients and professionals, but you can also buy them discounted in bulk. Clinicians like to do this so they can give them out to selected patients, like waiting room brochures on steroids. And teachers like to give (or resell) them to students as texts for workshops and classes. The more you buy, the cheaper they get. The full standard price is $1995.
| discount | price | $/book | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5+ books | 20% | $80 | $16 |
| 10+ books | 30% | $140 | $14 |
| 20+ books | 35% | $260 | $13 |
| 30+ books | 40% | $360 | $12 |
| 40+ books | 45% | $440 | $11 |
| 50+ books | 50% | $500 | $10 |
| 75+ books | 55% | $675 | $9 |
| 99+ books | 60% | $800 | $8 |
And bulk sets. That is, bulk licenses for my digital boxed sets, which each contain all ten books in the inventory, priced at $100 for individual sets. Bulk2! +Discounts for bulk sets (the list below) are lower than bulk books (the list above) because individual sets are already discounted 50%, so these discounts are on top of that. A regular individual set is $100, which is 50% the cost of buying the ten books it contains individually. It is already a “bulk purchase” of ten books. If bulk sets were discounted as steeply as bulk books, then they would be practically free. The way I’ve priced them, the cost of bulk sets is about equal to the cost of buying an equivalent number of bulk books.
| discount | price | $/set | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10+ sets | 10% | $900 | $90 |
| 15+ sets | 15% | $1275 | $85 |
| 20+ sets | 20% | $1600 | $80 |
| 25+ sets | 25% | $1875 | $75 |
Why not steeper discounts? I can only discount so far, because every student/patient is potentially a customer that might pay full price of their own accord, but it’s still definitely worth discounting.
Refunds
Although I will issue refunds for unused licenses, there are some important limitations you should know about. The full original value of activated book licenses are non-refundable. The non-refundable value is equal to whatever you would have paid for that many licenses originally, at the rates listed above. I will refund the balance of the original purchase price for up to a year, minus an administrative fee. The bottom line is that you can end up paying only for the licenses used … but at the price you would have paid for that many licenses originally. eg
Obviously it wouldn’t be fair to buy 100 licenses at the best possible price of $8/book, use only 10 of them, and then get a full refund for 90 books … because then you’d effectively getting the best possible discount on only 10 books, which normally would not qualify for that quite that good a discount. 🙂 I will happily refund a lot of that, but not so much that it cuts into whatever you would have paid if you’d only bought 10 licenses in the first place for $14/book. I also hold back an administrative fee of 10% (up to a maximum of $100). In detail:
- You buy 100 licenses for the maximum possible discount of 60% on each book, or $8 per book, paying $800.
- Only 10 licenses get activated, and then you request the maximum allowable refund for your unactivated licenses.
- If you’d only bought 10 to begin with, you would have only gotten a 30% discount, or $14 per book. So I will withold 10 × $14 = $140.
- I will also withold an administrative fee of 10% of your original purchase price ($80).
- In this case, your refund would be 800-140-80 = $580. The $220 I retain covers the value of the licenses actually used, at the posted rate for a 10-book buy… plus some extra for my time.
Note that all unactivated licenses would then be unavailable, of course (including any given out that haven’t been activated yet). It would be up to you to deal with any customer service issues that arise from that.
How do I buy?
Contact me by email at and we’ll discuss the most convenient payment option for you. Put “bulk purchase” in the subject line to guarantee the incoming email gets marked as high priority.
How does delivery actually work? How do people get their books?
It’s easy: bulk purchasers receive a batch of special customer IDs, just a set of numbers. These IDs are like simple “logins” that you pass on to patients/students. They aren’t tied to specific tutorials until they are used. When activated, the ID grants full customer status to the recipient, as if they were one of my direct customers, entitled to customer service and permanent access to the tutorial.
This system is handy for clinicians especially: you don’t have to decide which tutorials you want licenses for, you just have a stock of generic ones that can be used for any tutorial. You just tell the patient, “Go to this web link, use this code, and you’ll have access to a great tutorial about back pain.” Or patellofemoral pain. Or whatever.
When you run out of free licenses, you can digitally “re-stock” at any time.
Here's a more specific guide for bulk customers: How to issue bulk licenses
Case study A: buying for patients
Most clinicians are too busy to fully educate patients, and often their time is too expensive for patients to pay for it. So they like to be able to provide tutorials to selected patients, kind of like waiting room brochures but much more substantive. When a patient comes in with IT band syndrome, for instance, it’s nice to be able to provide them with a very deep tutorial on the topic.
The patient is usually delighted, of course. It’s great “added value.” They aren’t for everyone, but they are ideal for certain kinds of patients, the more intellectual and highly motivated ones.
Having a supply of generic licenses around means you can pick and choose, and hand them out at whatever pace feels right. Maybe it’s one patient per month, or maybe it’s one per day.
Case study B: Reselling to patients
Most clinicians simply give tutorial licenses away (a “loss leader”), but you can also resell them. I know of one customer who resells them at exactly the same price I do — he just adds it to the bill (with the patient’s consent, of course), making a small profit. Even at full price, the cost to the patient is a small percentage of the overall cost of his services. He considered it “reading so recommended that it’s not really optional.” It’s better than instructing the patient to buy from me directly, because many will never get around to it. But if it’s just part of the service …
And some clinicians add it to their bill, but at a lower price, like $5 or $10.
Case study C: Buying for students
Workshop and class instructors like to provide PainScience.com tutorials to students as “textbooks.” I’ve had many, many teachers tell me over the years that they strongly recommend my tutorials to their students … but some go further. As in the clinical setting, they can be given away as an appealing benefit (“free e-textbook included”), or resold at cost, or a small loss, or a small profit. However, it’s a common practice in educational settings to ask students to buy texts, so reselling is more common in this scenario.
