Hardware Logistics
Lighting, automotive, home improvements — the hardware industry offers a lot of opportunities and vertical for DTC brands to expand into.
But selling hardware online comes with a set of challenges.
By offering a one-stop shop for your customers, it’s important to ensure you carry a wide range of items that are in high demand. Not to mention the importance of staying competitive and building brand loyalty.
ShipBob can help.
ShipBob is a best-in-class 3PL that can optimise your hardware logistics strategy, so you can grow your business.
Read on to learn more about our fulfilment capabilities.
We’ve been very impressed by ShipBob’s high accuracy as well as their ability to meet their SLAs.Before we migrated to ShipBob, this was a challenge due to limited resources and time, and we used to frequently make shipping mistakes ourselves.
Waveform Lighting Team,
Request Fulfilment Pricing
We’ll get back to you within 24 hours. Privacy Policy
What is hardware logistics?
Hardware logistics refers to outsourcing the ecommerce supply chain to a third-party. It involves everything from warehouse receiving, to picking and packing, to shipping customer that include hardware parts, such as:
- Door knobs
- Cabinet hardware
- Drawer pulls
- Fasteners
- Nails
- Locks
- Automative parts
- and more.
Establish a hardware logistics strategy with ShipBob
With a global fulfilment network and best-in-class technology, ShipBob offers a wide range of fulfilment capabilities to help you create a cosmetics logistics strategy, including flexible fulfilment, advanced data and analytics, and other world-class logistics solutions.
ShipBob helps you grow your business faster and still provide a great customer experience as you expand.
Here is an overview of ShipBob’s hardware logistics solutions:
Real-time inventory management
Since hardware companies offer a wide range of different (but similar) parts, it’s important to have a system in place to optimise inventory levels and track inventory in real time.
ShipBob offers built-in inventory management to help you make better decisions on when to order more stock, how much, and where to store it geographically.
Using the ShipBob dashboard, you can easily control stock at each location, identify best-selling versus slow-moving inventory, set automatic reorder points, and much more.
Fast, affordable shipping
ShipBob’s fast fulfilment and automated shipping capabilities ensures you meet customer expectations.
ShipBob offers a 2-Day Express Program, which enables enables fast delivery for all continental US orders for any of our ecommerce store integrations. With 2-day shipping as the standard, merchants have been able to reduce cart abandonment by 18% and increase average order value by 97%.
Processing returns
Creating a solid returns management process can be a huge undertaking.
ShipBob’s order fulfilment solution gives you several different options on how to manage returns. We make it easy to manage all returns from one dashboard, and with every item returned, you have the option to have it restocked, quarantined, or disposed.
Additionally, ShipBob’s partner ecosystem is extensive and offers plenty of solutions to optimise your returns management process.
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.
Inventory management
At ShipBob, we empower merchants to manage their inventory with the right tools and guidance. It’s easy to view the status of inventory and quantity on hand across locations at any point in time, identify slow-moving inventory with high storage costs, and gain insights into the performance of units sold over time by channel.
Our inventory management software helps you set reminders to proactively replenish inventory with reorder notifications, bundle your products for promotions, make inventory transfer requests, and much more.
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.
How ShipBob improves your fulfilment and logistics
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.
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.
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.
