Once four or five people are buying through you, placing a separate order for each of them stops making sense. Combining customer orders into one Faberlic order is the obvious fix — and the point where casual record-keeping starts costing you money.
What pooling actually changes
An order is placed under your consultant number regardless of who the items are for. One basket, one shipment, one point of contact. That saves shipping and time.
What it does not change is liability. If a colleague's item is wrong, missing or delayed, you are the one explaining it. Everything below exists to keep that from happening.
A workable collection routine
- Pick one channel and refuse the others. Requests arriving by message, voice note and corridor conversation will not survive to the order screen. One thread, one document, one form.
- Write down exactly what was asked for. Full product name or code, quantity, and the person's name. "The blue one" is not a specification.
- Announce a cut-off. Catalogue cycles run roughly three weeks, so a closing date is not you being difficult — it is how the system works.
- Take payment before you order, at least in part. People change their minds far more often before goods arrive than after.
Splitting the shipping cost
Delivery arrangements differ across the 40+ countries Faberlic ships to, so there is no universal figure here. The rule that works everywhere is procedural: state how the cost will be split before collecting, not after the parcel lands. Equal shares or shares proportional to order value are both fine. An unannounced charge is not.
Keep a ledger, however crude
A single sheet with name, item, quantity, amount due and amount received is enough for the first year. The gap between catalogue price and your consultant price is your retail margin, and you cannot see that clearly if you cannot see who has paid.
The ledger has a second use nobody mentions: after three cycles it tells you who buys repeatedly. Those two or three names matter more than the order itself, because repeat buyers are what a small consultancy is built on.
Practical cautions
- Availability changes within a cycle — order promptly after your cut-off rather than sitting on the list
- Never promise a delivery date you did not read on the confirmation
- Keep the confirmation until every item has been handed over and paid for
The exact screens for placing and amending an order live in your account on faberlic.com and are worth learning there rather than from any written description. For the wider habits around customer work, see the business section.