Natural Product Inventory
Natural product brands have taken the ecommerce industry by storm.
In fact, the natural product market is worth $252 billion.
This goes to show there is high demand for independent natural product brands. But even with so much opportunity, there are challenges — especially when it comes to managing inventory
ShipBob is a premium 3PL that offers inventory management solution for fast-growing brands. Read on to learn more about your natural product inventory management services.
I think the biggest benefit and joy of working with ShipBob is the blocks of uninterrupted time I have back. I feel so free today. It really takes the stress out as a lone wolf entrepreneur.
Leonie Lynch,
Founder & CEO of Juspy
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What is natural product inventory?
Natural product inventory refers to inventory consisting of
With natural product inventory, businesses must implement inventory tracking systems that offer SKU management capabilities in order to organise, update, and view SKU at a glance.
This allows brands to track inventory across their sales channels and quickly make decisions on SKU performance.
ShipBob’s natural product inventory management services
“I felt like I couldn’t grow until I moved to ShipBob. Our old 3PL was slowing us down. Now I am encouraged to sell more with them. My CPA even said to me, ‘thank god you switched to ShipBob.’”
Courtney Lee, founder of Prymal
Managing natural product inventory can be a challenge.
But with ShipBob, common inventory management challenges are solved with the right technology, resources, and support support. Here’s how.
1. Track inventory in real time
ShipBob’s fulfilment technology designed to help manage inventory in real time. With the right real-time inventory management solution, you can reduce risks of inventory shrinkage, inaccurate inventory reports, stockouts, and backorders.
With inventory tracking software in place, your orders and inventory are synced in real time.
This makes it much easier to track inventory by increasing inventory visibility and providing insights into when it’s time to replenish inventory, run a promotion, and track slow-moving items that are no longer generating sales.
2. Easily manage SKUs
As you grow your natural product brand, you will deal with SKU proliferation. But holding on to certain variations of apparel items that don’t sell can cut into your profit margins in the long run. To stay profitable, it’s important to optimise inventory by determining slow-moving SKUs and possibly discontinuing them.
With ShipBob’s inventory tracking software, you can easily track slow-moving items vs. fast-moving items and make decisions on what SKUs to discontinue or replenish.
From ShipBob’s dashboard, you also have the option to assign a lot number to specific items stored in our fulfilment centre. After we receive your warehouse receiving order (WRO), we will store the items in separate locations, according to their lot number. You can learn more about our lot tracking process here.
“ShipBob completes a spot check for us to identify and locate such products and store them in a separate bin, so we can treat it as a separate SKU when shipping out those orders. That also saves me the time in having to deal with the return of those products to me.
We also have easy ways to manage subscription orders as well as expiration dates and lot numbers, so inventory goes in First In, First Out (FIFO).”
Leonie Lynch, Founder & CEO of Juspy
3. Fast and accurate fulfilment
Managing inventory is a major component of the ecommerce fulfilment process.
If you are currently handing fulfilment in-house but offer different products in variations, it might be time to partner with a ShipBob.
ShipBob’s entire distribution network is powered by the same fulfilment software, which includes built-in inventory management software. ShipBob can receive and store each SKU separately, pick and pack orders efficiently, and ship orders through the most cost-effective route. This allows you to spend less time on logistics but maintain visibility into operations.
It’s simple to add products to the ShipBob dashboard automatically or manually. If you have the same SKU imported from different stores, you can easily merge them to prevent duplicate products/inventory.
“First of all, their speed to scale and fast pick, pack, and ship process has been seamless, as our business grew 1,200% in a couple of weeks.
Second of all, their locations across the US — Touchland sells flammable goods that need to be shipped via ground, so ShipBob has been a great ally as they have fulfilment centres all over the US, facilitating a 2-3 day delivery time for any customer in the US.”
Andrea Lisbona, Founder & CEO of Touchland
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.