Home & Garden Fulfilment Services
Owning an online home and garden brand offers endless opportunity for growth. You can expand into new markets, sell through multiple channels, and introduce new product lines.
But without a strong fulfilment strategy, home and garden ecommerce brands can face challenges that can cut into profit margins and lower customer satisfaction.
A 3PL like ShipBob can help. With ShipBob, you save time and money while offering affordable shipping options, faster shipping, and more. Learn how ShipBob can help grow your home and garden brand.
With ShipBob, I can maintain my brand experience. It doesn’t end on my store — it lasts through that unboxing experience.
Tracey Wallace,
Founder of Doris Sleep
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What is home and garden fulfilment?
Home and garden fulfilment involves the process of storing inventory and picking, packing, and shipping customer orders. Orders can include a wide range of items from art decor, accent pieces, planters and faux plants, and much more. Fulfilment for home and garden brands require extra attention as many items can be fragile or heavy.
How ShipBob helps you grow your home and garden store
Brand awareness
The home and garden market is becoming increasingly competitive – there are a lot of big names out there, and consumers feel comfortable ordering from brands they’re familiar with. This is why generating brand awareness is important for your business.
One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating a memorable unboxing experience for your customers. ShipBob offers standard packaging at no extra, but we also allow merchants to use custom packaging, which is great for subscription orders delivered on a recurring basis. We also offer the ability to product bundle, which is a great option for home and garden brands when similar items are often purchased together (e.g., faux plant and planter, art print and frame, candle and candle holder, etc.).
Fast shipping
One challenge that ecommerce businesses can’t escape is the demand for faster shipping times — and at an affordable price. Consumers have come to expect a 2-day delivery duration as the new standard, and businesses have to either catch up or get left behind. ShipBob offers the ability to split inventory across multiple fulfilment locations, which speeds up delivery times and reduces shipping zones and costs.
Inventory management and forecasting
It’s important to have a system in place to track inventory in real time to prevent stockouts. ShipBob offers built-in inventory management and inventory forecasting tools to help you keep track of your inventory and make better decision. Using the ShipBob dashboard, you can closely track inventory levels at each location, identify slow-moving inventory, set reorder notification points to, and much more.
ShipBob’s order fulfilment process
ShipBob takes care of the entire order fulfilment process for you. Here is an overview of how ShipBob’s tech-enabled fulfilment process works.
1. Receiving
During this stage, a supplier, manufacturer, or ecommerce brand ships the required products to our warehouse, where our team will receive the shipment(s). The term ‘receiving’ refers to the acceptance of incoming inventory to be stored before it’s sold. During this step, a ShipBob fulfilment expert will make sure that all the items that were sent have arrived and are in good condition. From there, we store the inventory safely until items are ready to be picked.
2. Picking
Once an order is placed on your store, the picking process begins. We locate the item(s) so the entire order can be packed in the next step. Our proprietary warehouse management system (WMS) automatically assigns similar orders with inventory in the same area of the warehouse to the same picker to reduce the number of steps required to pick orders for a more efficient workflow.
A picking list is automatically generated, which includes the items ordered, quantity, and where each product is located in the fulfilment centre. Each unit that’s picked is scanned from the inventory container so inventory counts are updated in real-time, providing up-to-date stock levels for merchants.
3. Packing
Once items are picked, the next step is to securely pack orders and add the shipping label. ShipBob offers standard packing materials: brown boxes, plain bubble mailers and poly bags, packing tape, and dunnage, and are included at no extra cost. We choose the best packing materials for each order to both protect your products and achieve the lowest practical dimensional weight. We also allow our clients to use custom packing materials to put their brand front and centre.
4. Shipping
By outsourcing fulfilment to ShipBob, you can take advantage of our negotiated shipping rates with major shipping couriers. Our courier partners pick up packages from our fulfilment centres daily, which are sorted by each shipping service. From there, shipping couriers take care of the shipping, most often by truck or air shipping.
Get started with ShipBob
If your home and garden brands wants to grow sustainably, you need a 3PL you can trust. ShipBob offers everything you need to affordably outsource logistics and get back to what’s most important: improving customer loyalty, increasing profits, and offering exceptional products. Once you connect your store with ShipBob’s technology, you can ship inventory to one or more of our fulfilment centre locations.
Once orders are placed on your online store, we’ll take care of picking, packing and shipping orders on your behalf. Read on to learn the benefits of partnering with ShipBob.
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.
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.
