Sample Fulfilment Services

With more people shopping online, it can be a challenge to test products before purchasing.

That’s why more retailers are offering a sampling service to boost sales and provide a better customer experience for their customers.

Offering samples means more orders to pick, pack, and ship. ShipBob is a best-in-class 3PL that simplifies sample fulfilment, so you can spend less time and money on logistics.

Read on to learn about ShipBob’s sample fulfilment services.

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 sample fulfilment?

Sample fulfilment involves the picking, packing, and shipping of customer orders that include a sampling of one or more products. Being able to offer customers samples can be beneficial for all types of industries. Here are some examples:

  • Allowing customers to test fabric for home furnishings
  • Offering a sample of perfume to try out a new scent
  • Providing small packages of cosmetics to try different colours

Benefits of partnering with a 3PL like ShipBob

Fast fulfilment

25 % of online shoppers have entirely canceled an order because of slow delivery speeds.

To keep buyers engaged, it’s important to ship out samples as soon as possible. ShipBob offers fast fulfilment with a high order accuracy rate. With ShipBob’s 2-Day Express Program, you also have the option to offer

ShipBob’s 2-Day Express Shipping provides 100% coverage for 2-Day Express across the continental United States, even from a single fulfilment centre.

International fulfilment

Although online shopping allows access to your products from customers all over the globe, international order fulfilment services present entirely new challenges.

Different countries have various regulations, tariffs, taxes, and requirements for incoming shipments, making it difficult to navigate the international landscape.

For samples, it might not seem worth the price and headaches to provide this service for international customers.

But with ShipBob’s growing global fulfilment network, you can easily expand into new markets with ease and provide a consistent customer experience no matter where they live.

Inventory management 

It’s important to have a system in place to optimise inventory levels and track inventory in real time to prevent stockouts. 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.

How ShipBob works

Getting started with ShipBob is simple. Once you sync your online store to our technology, we help get you up and running quickly. As soon as we receive you inventory, orders are automatically sent to the closest fulfilment centre to the order’s destination and is quickly picked, packed and shipped.

From the ShipBob dashboard, you can set reorder points to restock in time, view advanced data and analytics to understand performance, and much more.

Additionally, ShipBob’s partner ecosystem is extensive and offers solutions for everything from marketing and taxes to returns management.

Partner with ShipBob

ShipBob offers everything you need to affordably expand your supply chain and get back to what’s most important: improving customer loyalty, increasing profits, and offering exceptional products.

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.

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.

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