My Top Five Shipping Tools

Discover my top 5 shipping tools and how they can save you time and money inside your subscription box business. 

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As a subscription box owner, I ship over 3,000 subscription boxes to my subscribers every month. That’s a lot of turquoise boxes filled with fun surprises making their way around the country. 

When I started my business, I had a brick and mortar boutique. My customers came to my shop and bought from me. In person. No shipping necessary. 

Then I added an online store and subscription boxes and suddenly, figuring out shipping became VERY important.

It took a lot of trial and error to get to where we are now – shipping online orders and all those subscription boxes efficiently and cost-effectively. 

Whether you already have a subscription box business or are working toward starting one, shipping deserves your attention. When something goes wrong - it demands your attention!

Today I’m sharing my top five shipping must-haves so you can skip the trial and error and get to shipping efficiency quickly.

1. Shipping Scale

I talk about the importance of knowing your numbers a lot inside Launch Your Box, my subscription box coaching membership. Knowing your numbers is crucial when looking at product costs and profit margins. It’s just as important when talking about shipping costs. Shipping costs can have a big impact on profit margins.

If you sell products and plan to ship them, you need a quality scale to weigh everything you ship. 

Small differences in weight can add up to big differences in shipping costs. 

I use my scale to check that all the items I choose to include in my subscription boxes stay within a specific weight range to keep my shipping costs low. A few ounces can make a big difference. 

Once the boxes are packed, they get weighed and then they’re ready to be picked up by my delivery service.

2. Packing Tape Gun

A packing tape gun is the BEST way to tape up all those packages! 

Still using the small, plastic tape dispenser you picked up from the grocery store? It’s time to upgrade. Right away. 

The days of wrestling with packing tape that gets jammed on those small dispensers is over. And running out of tape just when you get into a groove because your dispenser can only handle small rolls of tape? Yep, that’s over, too.

We talked about how important shipping efficiency is. Tape guns like this one are sturdy, hold bigger tape rolls, and help you move along so much faster. Buy your big rolls of tape in bulk. These are my favorites.

3. Rollo Label Printer

Anyone inside Launch Your Box knows how much I LOVE my Rollo Label Printer. And no, I don’t think love is too strong a word for a label printer. 🤣

We use the Rollo to print ALL our shipping labels. Thousands every month. The Rollo works with any direct thermal label and is compatible with all major couriers and software platforms. 

Are you starting to understand why I love it so much?

The Rollo really stepped up my label printing game. It never needs ink, it prints extremely quickly, and no special skills are needed to set it up. In other words, it’s practically perfect.

4. Fanfold Labels

Once you try fanfold labels, you’ll never go back to the roll! 

Why? 

By now, you know we ship out a LOT of packages every month. And each one of those packages needs a label. 

After they’re printed, fan fold labels form a nice, neat stack instead of a jumbled mess like rolled labels.

It might seem like a small thing, but untangling a jumble of labels takes time. And anything that takes extra time means lost efficiency in your shipping process.

Fanfold labels help keep things neat and tidy as your Rollo Printer works away printing labels for all those products and subscription boxes you need to send on their way to delight your customers!

5. Shipstation

ShipStation is a shipping platform and an absolute MUST for bulk shipping! 

The platform is easy to use and simplifies the shipping process for any business owner. That includes subscription box owners. 

I can go into ShipStation, pull up the name of the orders I’m shipping in bulk, and select the ones I want to print labels for. Almost like magic, they all print at once!

Combine Shipstation with your Rollo Printer and print thousands of labels at a time.

Find All My Favorite Subscription Box Supplies In My Amazon Shop!

Inside Launch Your Box, we also recommend Pirate Ship and Shippo. Inside the training library, we dedicate an entire module to all things Logistics, including shipping & fulfillment. Join the waitlist to get notified the next time Launch Your Box opens to new members!

Shipping is such an important part of your subscription box business. It impacts everything from profit margin to customer satisfaction. Take the time to develop shipping best practices that work for your subscription box business, incorporating these five shipping tools. 

Before you can ship your subscription boxes, you need to pack them. Check out my blog post all about packaging basics and download my Packaging Cheat Sheet. It’s filled with my favorite packaging resources.