Speaker 1: 0:00

So you want to launch a subscription box and don't know where to start? Girl, you are in the right place. I'm Julie Ball and I'm Renee Gonzalez, your host here at Subscription Box Basics, a podcast for new and aspiring subscription box entrepreneurs wanting to avoid overwhelm. So grab a coffee, some pen and paper and let's have some fun. Hey, and welcome back to Subscription Box Basics, julie Ball here, your head coach, and today I want to tell you our secret source for shipping. Actually, let's be honest, it's no secret. Where we get our shipping and who we love to recommend you get your labels from is Pirateship.

Speaker 1: 0:42

Pirateshipcom is our favorite software to buy postage for subscription box businesses. Again, no secret, but I'm not affiliated with them. I'm not getting any kickback, but I'm going to use this entire episode to tell you a little bit about Pirateship and why we love them. First of all, they are a free shipping software. It's web-based. You don't need to download any special software. There are no fees, no markups, no hidden costs, so there's legit zero risk to try it out. And so I'm going to tell you a little bit about them, some of the things that I love, so that you give it a chance and I really think that you'll be super happy with this software. It's going to save you money, it's going to make your life easier. So if you go to their website, the first thing you're going to see is they are completely themed with pirates. Their customer service actually even talks like pirates. Yes, they're there to support you, but they're there to make you laugh too, to just have a little fun with what can be a really challenging thing in your business. By far, their customer service and support is one of our favorite things, but also one of the things that really makes them stand out from the rest. They have a live chat seven days a week, 14 hours a day, except on holidays. So there's no reason why you can't get support between their live chat, and they also have tons of support docs. But I'm telling you, this software is so freaking easy. You'll be able to get set up without even using any of their support docs.

Speaker 1: 2:27

Their founders have built dozens of subscription boxes and they learned everything they could about shipping logistics along the way and built this platform to make it easier for themselves and for you. So they use the power of aggregation, so basically bringing together the orders of hundreds and thousands of other small businesses to negotiate better rates for you with UPS and USPS United States Postal Service. In fact, they say they can save you up to 89% off of the standard rates. If you went into a post office or to a UPS store, you're going to pay one rate that counter rate but if you buy your postage through Pirate Ship, you're getting these different tiers, these commercial rates and even deeper discounts than you'll find on some of the other softwares.

Speaker 1: 3:20

What can you actually do in this software? You can create your labels, whether you're doing a single label or whether you're doing batch labels. You can compare pricing. So when you put in all of the details about where you're shipping to, where you're shipping from and the dimensions and weight of your box or your polymail or whatever you're shipping, you can compare the pricing based off of what's cheapest and what's fastest. Then you get to choose the type of postage that you want that is going to best fit your needs, and I love that. You're going to be able to track it from point A to point B.

Speaker 1: 3:55

So basically, when you ship it to, when it arrives, it has tracking inside the dashboard and you can also send tracking emails out to your customers, which is great because that's going to help you with your customer service. They're going to get an email that says your box has been shipped. It's been shipped with this service on this day and here's the tracking information. I love that. I even customize that to have your brand voice and imagery, if you'd like. What's also really cool about those tracking emails is that you can pre-schedule them. I did this all the time I would buy my batch postage on a certain day and I knew I needed two or three days to finish packing before they would actually go out, so I could schedule those tracking emails to go out at a later date so that they wouldn't sit in their inbox without any movement of the boxes. So love that feature. When you log in and you can go to your dashboard, you can get reports, and what's really cool about the reports is that you can see exactly how much you're spending on postage and it's actually going to give you an average as well for your batches. So that will help you when you're trying to predict your cost based off of these averages. If you know your average box costs you $9 to ship month after month, you can predict that and use that as a great data point to figure out how much to charge or how much shipping is going to cost you when you sign up for your free pirate ship account.

Speaker 1: 5:35

You're going to want to go ahead and do some customization so you can do some presets. For example, if you have the same size box that goes out every month, it's great. You can just put that in as a preset. You don't have to type in the dimensions every single month. All things like that can save you time and streamline your operations. You can add your ship from addresses, so maybe that's your home address if you ship from home. That way you don't have to put that in every single time and it'll have accurate information. You can have a return address that is different than what your shipping address is. So, for example, I had a return address of my PO box because I didn't want to put my home address on the labels of every single one of those boxes. I just wanted that information to be private. So I used a PO box for my return address.

Speaker 1: 6:27

I remember when I first launched my subscription box I did a lot of checks and balances because I was afraid that one software wouldn't have the same information as another software. So, for example, I used Cratejoy at the time to run my subscription box business, and I used Pirate Ship to purchase postage. I would run reports and do checks and balances to make sure that I was shipping the right stuff, but I found after a couple months that the information absolutely was accurate, and I stopped doing those checks and balances because I trusted in the integration of the software, and so what that means is, as new orders would come in through Cratejoy, the integration that I had with Pirate Ship allowed that data to be sent to Pirate Ship, and so I could then look at my shipments in Pirate Ship. I could filter by what batch they were, where they were going, what state they were going to, if I wanted to do that. I didn't need to do that, of course, but I'm just sharing with you that you can do all these filters to help you with your batches. Another example would be I ran two separate batches for gift orders and non-gift orders, because our gift orders had additional information like messages, gift messages and so we could print that right out on our labels through Pirate Ship, making it so much more streamlined.

Speaker 1: 7:50

Now, when I'm talking about integrations, I mentioned Cratejoy, but listen, let me read this list of all the integrations that you can use. This is subscription box software and just general e-com software. So if you're selling in multiple places, this is a great place for you to funnel all your orders in and just print your postage in one place. So you can upload a spreadsheet if you need to and that will populate all the information. You can print a batch from a spreadsheet. Or these are the softwares that Pirate Ship already has integrations with Shopify, subly, etsy, woocommerce, bigcommerce, cratejoy, paypal, squarespace, ebay, chargeify and Big Cartel. Now they add new softwares from time to time, so if I didn't mention your software, you can check back later.

Speaker 1: 8:47

But honestly, this is going to be such a time saver, such a money saver for you and just make shipping easy. Yes, you can ship internationally with Pirate Ship. Yes, you can bulk print your batches and if you're using USPS, you can even print your scan sheets from Pirate Ship. And if you don't know what that is a scan sheet, is it's going to look at one batch and it's going to put all of that information into one code. That say you have a hundred boxes, instead of the USPS scanning each box individually to gather the data, they scan your one code on your scan sheet for that batch and it uploads all the data, all of the tracking information, where it's going, et cetera. So it's really great, especially if you are scheduling pickups at your house. You can give the postal worker the scan sheet and they will really appreciate that they don't have to scan every single box separately.

Speaker 1: 9:47

So I know I've talked a lot about the features. I really encourage you to go to pirateshipcom, check it out for yourself. Sign up. It's free again. No commitment, zero risk, because there's no monthly fees, no markups, no hidden costs, no, nothing. What do you have to lose? I hope this quick episode was really helpful for you to see what a great option Pirate Ship is for you, especially if you've been scratching your head saying, oh, where do I buy the postage, or do I take this to the desk at the post office? No, you can buy the postage right on pirateshipcom.

Speaker 1: 10:19

Print it out from any printer. You don't have to have a label printer. You can print it out on regular paper. When I first launched my box, I used a basic black and white printer from Brother that was the brand name I think. I probably got it at Staples or Office Depot and then, as I grew my box business, I invested in a thermal printer which prints four by six labels for using heat instead of ink, and so I can put my Amazon link in the show notes if you're interested in buying yourself a thermal printer. I used a Rolo and I used a DymO for Excel. If given the choice, I would pick Rolo, but both of them are really great. That's it for today. Now you know our shipping secrets. Go check it out at pirateshipcom and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye resin research you.