Educational Product Fulfilment Services

With more educational institutions adapting to new ways in teach (i.e., class via Zoom!) — parents and educators are now shopping online more than ever to find information and educational products to support these changes.

Whether you cater to levels K to 12 or universities, selling educational publishing items online provides a lot of opportunity to support the education industry.

But in order to get in front of the right audience — you need a strong fulfilment strategy to support your brand.

ShipBob can help.

ShipBob is a best-in-class global fulfilment provider with premium technology. With ShipBob, you can expand your brand without being tied down in day-to-day operations.

Read on to learn how ShipBob can help you expand your educational publishing brand.

Request Fulfilment Pricing

We’ll get back to you within 24 hours. Privacy Policy

What is educational supplies and materials fulfilment?

Education equipment, school and teaching supplies, and publishing fulfilment services involves the picking, packing, and shipping process of educational books and other media for direct-to-consumer and educational institutions.

Products fulfiled include:

  • Textbooks and workbooks
  • Classroom supplies
  • Art supplies
  • Notebooks, pens, and pencils
  • Educational posters
  • Awards and recognition products
  • And more

The educational product and materials market online continues to grow as more educators and parents are adapting to remote or hybrid learning. Fulfilment experts like ShipBob can help ensure educational products are delivered safely and on time.

ShipBob’s education distribution services

ShipBob takes care of the entire order fulfilment process for you, so you can save time, money, and headaches. Here’s an overview of ShipBob’s proven fulfilment process.

ShipBob offers both direct-to-consumer fulfilment and B2B fulfilment. This way, you can cater to both audiences while keeping logistics operations under one network.

As you enter into new channels, ShipBob can help you manage both B2C and B2B orders and provide full visibility into the fulfilment process all from one dashboard. You can learn more about our B2B process here.

Get a glimpse inside one of our fulfilment centres:

Here is an overview of ShipBob’s process, from warehouse receiving to automated shipping:

Step 1: Receiving

Once you fill out a Warehouse Receiving Order (WRO), which includes an overview of what we’re receiving, you can ship your inventory to one or more of our fulfilment centres to be stored.

By distributing your inventory across out network, you can enable affordable, 2-day shipping for customers by reducing the amount of shipping zones a package must travel through to reach its destination.

Each SKU has a separate dedicated storage location, either on a shelf, in a bin, or on a pallet.

Step 2: Picking and packing

As soon as an order is placed on your online store, ShipBob automatically receives the order and it is assigned to a warehouse picking team or a picker. Our picking team receives a picking list of the items, quantities, and storage locations at the facility to collect the ordered products from their respective locations.

For packing, we offer standard packing materials — brown boxes, poly mailers, packing tape, and dunnage — at no extra cost. For a more custom solution, we also allow the use of custom packaging.

ShipBob also offers subscription or recurring order capabilities, so you can offer a reliable subscription service for your customers.

Step 3: Shipping

ShipBob offers volume shipping discounts from major couriers such as Australia Post, FedEx, DHL, and UPS.

Last-mile delivery is one of the most expensive parts of the fulfilment process, so shipping discounts can save your business lots of money in the long run.

How ShipBob works

Partnering with ShipBob as your 3PL is easy. We offer fast onboarding, direct integrations with leading ecommerce platforms, and inventory and order management tools to provide transparency into the entire fulfilment and shipping process.

Here’s an overview:

Sync your store with ShipBob

ShipBob makes syncing your online store simple with direct integrations with leading ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, WooCommerce, and Square Online.

Visibility into the fulfilment process

Maintain end-to-end control of the fulfilment process from your ShipBob dashboard. Search for orders, monitor order status, and track packages as they ship to customers.

Track inventory in real time

Once your store is connected to ShipBob’s dashboard, you get a number of valuable inventory management tools at your disposal. View inventory levels in real-time, set reorder points, keep a safety stock, and distribute your inventory strategically so you always have product in the right place at the right time.

Read on to learn more about how ShipBob works.

Distributed inventory

With ShipBob’s network of fulfilment centres, you can strategically split your inventory across our locations to get your products from point A to point B more quickly and affordably. Storing inventory near your customers helps reduce the shipping zones and costs associated with shipping orders to faraway destinations.

Distributed inventory also helps you stay competitive by offering fast shipping to your customers. When an order is placed, ShipBob’s algorithm automatically selects the warehouse and courier that will give you the quickest turnaround at the best price. This strategy has helped our merchants bring 13% savings to their bottom line.

100% Coverage Across the Continental US

If you’re looking to expand into the United States, ShipBob has 2-Day Express Shipping that provides 100% coverage in the continental US from even just one fulfilment centre.

You can also distribute your inventory across ShipBob’s fulfilment centres across all regions of the United States. We leave it up to you to decide where you want us to store your inventory.

Order management

At ShipBob, we track your orders from A to Z. Filter orders by status, search for specific orders, see a quick timeline view of where your order is in the fulfilment process (e.g. when an order is picked, packed, or shipped), easily find shipping-related information (e.g., weights, dimensions, or courier service), and get a quick snapshot of any orders that require action.

With order management software for your direct-to-consumer and wholesale shipments, you can manage subscriptions, make changes to your orders post-purchase, map your store’s shipping options to ShipBob, and automatically share tracking information with your customers.

Reporting and analytics

To provide you with visibility into our operations and performance, and also hold ourselves accountable, ShipBob’s free analytics tool is packed with charts to help you with everything from year-end reporting, to better supply chain decision-making.

Data can be a competitive advantage, and our reports show an analysis of which fulfilment centres you should stock, days of inventory left before you run out, impact of promotions on stock levels, each shipping method’s average cart value, shipping cost, and days in transit, your fulfilment cost per order, storage cost per unit, and much more.

End-to-end customer experience

We care about the customer experience as much as you and strive to be an extension of your team. From custom branded boxes to free plain packaging, ShipBob works with you to provide the unboxing experience you want. We also help you offer the fastest, most cost-effective shipping options to meet your customers’ expectations.

As soon as an order ships, tracking is pushed back to your store. We also offer return management services, allowing customers to generate return shipping labels and track returns, while getting your products processed and back into your available inventory as efficiently as possible.

Save on fulfilment costs

Coffee creamer brand Prymal joined ShipBob in 2019 and was quickly able to save $8,000 per month on fulfilment costs, while at the same time achieving 4x growth.

Learn more about Prymal’s growth

Improve your conversion rate

Not only was BAKblade able to scale internationally by partnering with ShipBob, but they found adding 2-Day Shipping increased their conversions as well.

Learn more about BAKblades’s growth

Store, ship, and grow internationally

Sunglasses brand Ombraz distributed their inventory across 3 fulfilment centres in two different countries. This has allowed them to ship to 55 countries on seven continents.

Learn more about Ombraz’s growth