Indie Beauty Fulfilment Services
The global beauty market is expected to reach $805.61 billion by 2023. And a big portion of this revenue is from indie brands.
The rising trend in indie beauty is a global phenomenon. If you’re looking to grow your indie beauty business online, it might be time to partner with ShipBob.
Learn how ShipBob can help you establish a global presence and reach customers faster and more affordably.
Touchland has been working with ShipBob since 2018 and there are several reasons why ShipBob has been the perfect partner. Overall, we have had a great experience having a ShipBob as a partner that can scale fast with us.
Andrea Lisbona,
Founder & CEO of Touchland
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What is indie beauty fulfilment?
Indie beauty fulfilment refers to the picking, packing, and shipping of items, including:
- Makeup
- Personal care
- Hair products
- Face and body care products
- And more.
These types of products need extra attention when it comes to inventory storage and shipping safely, such as fragile fulfilment.
And indie beauty brands depend on flexible fulfilment services with value adds, such as subscription, international shipping, and B2B fulfilment services.
Challenges of indie beauty fulfilment
Fulfilling and shipping indie beauty orders come with unique challenges, such as managing shelf life and additional fulfilment and shipping needs, such as shipping globally.
Managing shelf life
If you sell products like shampoo, lipstick, or anything else for body, face, and hair, most likely there is a shelf life.
Although makeup doesn’t always come with a “best by” date, they do expire at some point. From ingredients to environment, there are so many different factors that determine the shelf life of makeup products.
One important factor to keep in mind is if you’re selling organic or natural makeup products, the shelf life is significantly shorter.
ShipBob offers lot tracking to better track expiration dates in the event of a recall, and our fulfilment software’s logic is designed to always ship items with the closest expiration lot date.
Shipping fragile items
Some indie beauty products might also come in glass or have plastic pieces that make for fragile shipments. For example, some makeup products come with small, delicate pieces like applicators that can easily break.
Before you ship a product, consider ways to provide extra protection. A little bit of tape to keep makeup containers sealed shut or an applicator in place goes a long way.
Shipping internationally
Many indie beauty brands have found success by going global. If you’re looking to ship products internationally, be aware of any limitations.
For instance, alcohol-based fragrances are considered hazardous materials and cannot be shipped by air without certification.
Certain face and body care ingredients may also be banned in certain locations around the world. ShipBob has fulfilment centres in multiple countries and can help with international fulfilment.
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.
Sync your store with ShipBob
ShipBob makes syncing your online store simple with direct integrations with leading ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, 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.
“Once we could see the pitfalls in our old manual system of fulfilling orders, we just realised we need something else to scale with. To get where we were going, we would need more structure to support all of our growth — so we switched to ShipBob.”
Bethany Peterson, COO of FlutterHabit
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.
“We have a Shopify store but do not use Shopify to track inventory. In terms of tracking inventory, we use ShipBob for everything — to be able to track each bottle of perfume, what we have left, and what we’ve shipped, while getting a lot more information on each order.”
Ines Guien, Vice President of Operations at Dossier
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 carrier 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 carrier 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.
