The thought of shopping for things like boxes was not on my mind when I took my current position at my job. The reality is that our company has made a whole lot of changes and our entire marketing section just was told to do everything in the house. That means that we are working projects that we never have and are learning just like major marketing companies how to purchase items from the best location in order to keep costs low and our business sales high.
The thing we ended up doing was learning how to purchase items for corporate gifting first. We knew we needed our products to be of high quality and they had to look fancy. This is a complicated task when it comes to making regular cardboard look good. I think that our process for finding those products was good and want to share it with you to save you time in the future.
The first thing we had to do was find out what type of products we needed. We looked at what we had purchased last quarter from marketing companies and had sent out. It was our first goal to deconstruct those items and then find out what we would need to look for when shopping. So we learned that we needed a specific type of box, filling, and tape. Those were the three main items to send these gifts which we would order separately depending on the company we were gifting to. Now that we knew what we needed the plan was to find the best price, shipping, and availability. That was a certainly complicated task but worth the time invested due to the cost savings we could get each quarter. The goal was to save money so we knew we needed to get all of these shipping supplies cheap and fast.
The first thing we did was what we all do and check Amazon. The idea was to find something that we could ship within two days and get in high quantity for a good price. This was indeed what we found, but the shipping for large quantities actually was about a week because it was not on prime for most of the products we needed. The other thing was that the custom great looking boxes were really not available. This was a viable option and I kept all of the prices in the cart because I like to be precise. I then decided I wanted to see what would happen if I went local and found a place that we could get any products we wanted by simply driving 10 minutes to. This meant a local big box shipping supplies store was on the list.
We went right along to our local store and started looking around. The convenience was great because if we had an issue we could get any box, tape, or filing right away by driving down the road. But the options were varied limited in-store and the idea of custom was none existent. The prices were also much higher than Amazon and that was a sad thing. The convenience was great but probably not worth the lack of choice and the fact that the stock was not in great quantity. So the obvious choice was to buy online. That is simply what we did and we saved a bunch.
