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Hi all — does anyone work with a swag vendor they really like? We’ve recently switched to a new vendor who came highly recommended, but is not working for our purposes.
We’re very global and many of our customers and users work from home, so we need to be able to ship to international, residential addresses (including India). We’re typically sending a t shirt, socks, other small and pre-produced swag items. I figure many other companies are in this situation and our previous vendor didn’t have these issues, so I want to see what other customer marketers are doing and who you love working with!
my last place used both Sendoso and Reachdesk - I preferred Reachdesk since it was a bit better at handling international sends and had local marketplaces for each international location that you may need. it was a bit pricey though!
We’re looking at sendoso and Reachdesk — was the priciness in the shipping costs or in the platform fees? Or in the cost of the actual swag items?
I believe it was mostly the platform itself, but I'm sure there's room for negotiation. they had pretty reasonable shipping costs
Ok cool — we have budget allocated for the platform fee (which we’re not currently paying with our vendor) but the shipping costs seem astronomical…. Like $200+ to send a t shirt to Canada from the US. I’m trying to figure out if I have unreasonable expectations or if these costs are in line with what we’re seeing in 2024…
I used to work at Alyce, to some extent because my team at my previous company had such a miserable time with Sendoso. Then Sendoso bought Alyce 🥴 . The positive side of Sendoso is that my former colleague is now running Support, and she is AWESOME. The negative is that the software itself is super clunky and the warehouses take zero responsibility for lost or damaged items. Reachdesk is great, especially if you do a lot of shipping in Europe. No idea how well they handle South Asia though.
that’s great to know — thank you!! We do a ton of shipping to Europe but I’ll look into their APAC shipping capabilities as well
^^ I had similar issues with Sendoso - lots of mishaps with shipping items to different warehouses and so much back and forth with support. it was a mess, but from what I've heard, they've had a major overhaul with teams involved
That, and also Sendoso will hold your swag hostage or else hit you with monster fees if you pull your stuff out of their warehouses.
This is awesome — thank y’all so much! Will literally schedule a demo with reachdesk today haha
Have y’all ever used a vendor who didn’t have a platform? Just warehoused and shipped out items? I’m also looking at going that route (closer to what we’re doing now)
We use BlueSky for all of our swag. They are based in the US but have used them to ship globally (aus, emea and Japan). They can create a store for you (which we have used for customers previously) but they're mainly a swag company. I've used them at 3 companies and they are super reliable, good prices, good quality. Also SUPER responsive. I absolutely love working with them. Happy to do an intro of you want!
I used Printfection in my past company that had to ship to APAC and ANZ as well. It was a good experience and they had a couple of options around shipping. The only drawback for me was that they didn't used to have gift cards. Not sure if that's better now. Edit to say that the support and responsiveness of the team as great!
we've used Tremendous for gift cards and it's been working well, so we really just need the physical swag piece. will add BlueSky and Printfection to our list! , would love an intro! thanks!
So far Reachdesk is the best I've had for international shipping. I am considering switching to them next year when my contract is up with our current vendor (CorporateGift) who has been so difficult to work with. CG is free to use and marks up everything at 15%, but it is not great at all for international shipping. I am just hoping the fees we've paid have covered the platform fee for a gifting platform like Reachdesk.
We also didn't have a great experience with Sendoso. So clunky. Also, Alyce is great for ABM, but wasn't initially built for customer gifting and tradeshow POS drops and were very expensive.
Non-platform vendor rec would be Nadel. If you wanted to just have a convo with someone I have a good friend who would be down to talk with you just to understand what you need! She’s super creative and just has fun ideas (if you wanted to innovate a bit) Jessica.harrison@nadel.com
