Trusted By 100s Of Brands To Reduce Small Parcel Shipping Rates
Stop Overpaying For Costly eCommerce Shipping Services
Save Time By Integrating New Shipping Technologies
Even if you use different shipping couriers, connect your brand to Stone Shipping using simple integrations that connect sales data to each order placed.
Receive Discounted Rates On eCommerce Shipping
Your brand should have access to discounted eCommerce shipping rates – pass these savings on to customers or re-invest the profits back into your business.
Provide Expense-Reducing Shipping Options
Customers should be able to choose a variety of small parcel shipping options. Whether you offer free shipping, reduced rates, or expedited services, your customers will enjoy cost-saving options.
Refine Your Shipping Process
Compare Rates Between Major Carriers
Should you ship your small parcels using USPS, Canada Post, or Royal Mail? Instead of searching individual rates from major carriers, your shipping department will receive small parcel shipping estimates from multiple companies in one central hub.
Reduce Delivery & Return Expenses
Stone Shipping makes your order fulfillment process easier because of simple integrations into existing systems. The fact is, Stone Shipping makes it easy to reduce eCommerce shipping costs, whether you’re sending orders to customers or they’re returning them.
Stay Up To Date With 24/7 Access To Shipping Metrics & Reporting
Your business should be able to make better business decisions with timely access to your brand’s shipping and return data. The truth is that creating custom reports and sorting the data by shipping metrics allows your brand to determine where you can improve shipping processes.
Improve eCommerce Sales Processes
Process New & Existing Orders With Ease
Add the right tools to your brand’s shipping arsenal that make it easier to manage the shipping process for customer orders. Filter, split, batch, and combine orders from a simple-to-use system that reduces shipping costs while eliminating tedious work.
Enhance Customer Communication
Provide real-time shipping information to customers the moment their orders are being fulfilled from your warehouse. Your customer service team will experience fewer inbound inquiries asking for shipment details because real-time information is automatically sent to customers.
Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment
Shipping costs have the most significant impact on shopping cart abandonment. Pass along lower shipping costs to your brand’s customers to increase sales and reduce the likelihood they’ll leave your brand’s website without buying first.
Now It’s Easier Than Ever For Brands To Save Money On Small Parcel Shipping
1. Integrate Stone Shipping To Existing Systems & Operations
Stone Shipping integrates with your existing system within a few clicks, and it’s straightforward to use. We created our software with easy connectivity in mind, so your IT team should be able to effortlessly connect shipping systems and operations without complex installation processes and tech headaches.
2. Leverage Stone Shipping Software
Are you worried about steep software learning curves within your company? If so, Stone Shipping is the ideal solution for your team. It’s easy to use, even for beginners, without compromising on power and utility. Stone Shipping software reduces the challenge of managing several sales platforms and provides a simple shipping solution.
3. Benefit From Reduced Small Parcel Shipping Rates
Calculate shipping costs, receive estimates from carriers, and minimize shipping expenses anywhere from seven to twenty percent. The amount your brand saves depends on product dimensions and weight. The fact is, you can use the extra savings however you see fit, including increasing marketing spend, hiring new employees, or expanding operations.
Stone Shipping’s Money Back Guarantee
Does your organization already pay low shipping rates? Discover how much Stone Shipping can save by adding Stone Shipping software to your existing systems. If you’re already “locked-in” to low rates and we can’t save you money on shipping rates, we’ll still give you $100 or donate $100 to your favorite charity.
Client Testimonials
“Sunken Stone is a dream to work with. When they took over our account it was like the clouds cleared. They brought clarity and insights and efficiency. When we started working with them, we were doing about $50k/mo in Rev on Amazon. Now we’re doing $300k/mo. They handle everything from listing optimization and amazon ad campaign to inventory management, logistics. They even manage reviews and unauthorized resellers which can really hurt your brand. Plus no black hat shady business when it comes to these guys. You can trust they won’t do anything to jeopardize your brand or your listings on Amazon. You’re in good hands.”
Djamel Bettahar
COO, Fitlife.tv
Frequently Asked Questions
Sure thing! Let our expert PPC team take a deep dive into your campaigns. Please submit a request using this contact form.
If you want to do one yourself, use this video.
Great question! We have two models, MAX RESULTS and MAX CONTROL. MAX RESULTS is where you sell under our account and gain exclusive access to beta testing groups & more, while MAX CONTROL is where we take the reins of your account & take your brand as far as you want to take it!
The one month of onboarding is where we build out and optimize your listings, perform keyword research, and get you integrated into our systems.
We create customized marketing/advertising solutions to help your brand prosper on Amazon! While we do not provide the service in-house, we do collaborations with influencers & experienced affiliate partners that lead your brand to success.
Yes, we manage international brands and handle FBA overseas/internationally. We also have PanEU status so our shipping rates are really cheap. (Spoiler alert: ask use about Stone Shipping)
Yes, you can put an insert inside the box. We can give you some good examples of inserts our brands use.
No, it does not. You are in total control of your price on every channel. If you were selling products to Amazon directly, then there would be some restrictions. But we are selling products directly to consumers.
It is highly recommended that you market outside of Amazon. Google Ads, FB, and Instagram Ads should all be driving traffic towards your website. Your Amazon channel, your website, and social media all work hand in hand. As one grows the other naturally grows as well.
You should get FB, affiliates, etc., going first or at the same time as Amazon. If you start with Amazon first, with no outside push, it is going to be very difficult to grow that platform by itself. So if you are starting the affiliates up within the month, then we should start building out your listings soon. So that once affiliates and FB is going for a couple of weeks, we can turn Amazon on and start selling immediately and hopefully have some traction.
A trademark gives them access to the brand registry which will give them access to A+ content and a brand store page.
We can handle Brand Registry for you on Amazon.
We have built our own software in-house to run giveaways for ranking. Its called the Amazon Saturation Vortex.
There is no way to track whether that customer came from someone from your outside of Amazon marketing efforts. This goes both ways though. People that shop from your call center are probably going to go to Amazon as well and people that find you guys on Amazon first are probably going to buy from your website. Sales are going to go back and forth but it will be a rising tide. As one channel grows, the other will as well.
We handle post-purchase emails as well. You guys can let us know what you want on the email template.
Our team usually handles this (especially for MAX RESULTS), but we go off of your FAQs. If we can’t answer a question, we reach out to your team for the correct response. We have a 24-hour team monitoring customer reviews and questions.
Amazon automatically collects the taxes in about 30 different states. You will only be paying taxes for your products, not anyone else’s products.
Our main model is performance-based where we take a percentage of gross sales + a monthly management fee. If you are a newer/smaller brand, we may start off with a test trial first (aka FEATHER TEST), to see if our services would work for your products.
There are a lot of things that make us different. We have been around since 2007, are partnered with 100+ brands, and have 90+ full-time employees. Our model is different as well. We sell your products on consignment under our seller account so that you can take advantage of every beta program and marketing lever Amazon has to offer.
We have a few different models depending on current sales, SKU size, and what type of management you are looking for that will determine pricing for the brands. When a brand is selling more than $30k per month on Amazon, we have a model where we take a percentage of incremental sales + a monthly management fee. If a brand has a very small amount of SKUs, and the accounting is the same as the other brands, we can potentially just add them on to the same deal.
During the FEATHER TEST, you will not want to swap out SKUs. Please give us SKUs that you know are your best sellers, or there are going to be here year-round. If your brand is crushing it in sales, we will just keep adding in SKUs at little to no cost.
Once they sign up they stay – some have been with us for 6+ years.
We would be willing to work with new brands, but we would need a good ad spend budget.
The reporting/accounting happens on the actual SKU. This is how we can tell which returns and discounts are on whose products/brands. We have SOPs and software in place to help manage this process. There has never been a case when the reporting has been messed up with another brand or product.
Yes, at any point during your 6-month agreement, you may choose to opt-out at that point, or continue working with us. (Spoiler Alert: Most of our clients stick with Sunken Stone)
The eight countries that we manage include ALL of North America (Canada, USA, Mexico), and the EU (UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain). The UK has the biggest Amazon presence in that region. If you already have a presence in one of these areas, we should definitely start there. We can get you into any of the other 7 countries, but we don’t know what your ROI will be in these markets until we try.
No, you would not have to maintain those softwares if you do not want to. We have helium, and our dashboard should be better than managing by stats. So we have software that should take care of everything you guys need for the most part.
We use Feedback Genius and about 25 other pieces of software to manage accounts.
Once we receive your 30-day notice and determine a cancellation day, we would need to plan to remove all inventory back to a US warehouse that you choose, as well as payment for those removal fees.
Yes, you can cancel the agreement at any time. We would ask for a 30-day notice.
Yes, you will have to add our name to your insurance.
Amazon automatically collects the taxes in about 30 different states. You will only be paying taxes for your products only, not anyone else’s products.
The FEATHER TEST is a 4-month test trial where we pull out all the stops to help your brand grow on Amazon in a short amount of time. 1 month of onboarding and 3 months of aggressive sales where we are either going to fail fast and fail cheap or succeed.
The FEATHER TEST limits the number of SKUs we initially manage, please reach out to our sales team with any questions.
Whenever you have new SKUs you want to add in, we can just build those SKUs out and create a marketing plan for growth. There won’t be any other additional fees – we would just take our management fee + our percentage of sales.
On the conservative end, you should spend 5-10% of sales, but if you want to go into full growth mode, it should be up to 20% of sales.
It should be acceptable but if you want to add a clause holding Sunken Stone responsible, we are going to have to add another sentence along the lines of “Amazon is unpredictable and products and accounts get suspended all the time. We’re going to use our best efforts to prevent this and help you if this happens”. The reason we need to add something like this is that things go wrong because of Amazon all the time. So we just want to naturally prevent being sued if it’s Amazon’s fault.
You would be paid monthly by us. Amazon would take their cut, we take our cut, advertising money gets taken off and shipping fees as well, then the rest gets deposited into your bank account every month. This way, you never have to pay out of pocket for anything besides the initial onboarding fee.
We handle all sales tax for you so you don’t have to worry about it.
Yes, you will need to manage your brand for the 1-month of onboarding while we build everything out in the backend. We will definitely be giving you advice on what to do and not do during that time.
We can manage your seller account for you on Amazon – the fee structure is a bit different. The model is a bit more expensive to start vs the feather test but becomes cheaper as sales grow.
We can assist you in getting the resellers off of Amazon but no Amazon management company would be able to do it themselves. We have a price monitoring tool available called TRAPPR as well. We have the language for cease and desist letters, sign you up for the transparency program, get Uabide involved, etc. We would just need the brand’s help in order to get resellers off, but yes, we definitely run point on everything.
The transition is very simple. We just start selling your products for you on Amazon. The onboarding process takes one month. So you send us over your assets, we build out & optimize your listings, have you send in inventory on consignment to Amazon, and then we start selling and become your official seller. You would turn your seller account off once we go live so that you are not competing against yourself. If our agreement were ever to come to an end, you would turn your seller account back on, stop shipping under our name, and ship under your own name again – then start selling your own products again with all the content and reviews sticking with the listings
Your account manager will send you an onboarding form. We will also need your seller account logins.
The other Amazon fees are their referral fees, storage fees, shipping fees & variable category fees.
Yes, the setup fee is still necessary. The setup is not just for content & design – it’s integration into our systems, building out a customized marketing plan for your brand, review funnels, keyword research & more. We integrate you into 10 different softwares, including our own and third-party tools.
We have about 10 different strategies to get rid of unauthorized resellers, plus we have a map compliance monitoring tool called TRAPPR.
The cost of Fulfilled by Amazon or FBA depends on how big your items are. If you have items that are light and small, we can get them on a light shipping program which would be about $1.50 per unit. When we need you to ship in more inventory to amazon, we will let you know and send you the shipping labels. You would then ship your products to an Amazon distribution center.
International Sales: After the first 6 months of sales, (once we get good traction in the US), we will be happy to expand you into international markets. We can go into Amazon Canada, Amazon Mexico or Amazon EU, which consists of the UK, Itlay, Spain, France, and Germany). Same SKU count rules apply there as well.
You will not want to sell through your own seller central because you will be competing against yourself. We will also be fighting for the buybox and advertising which will hurt your business. You can temporarily suspend your seller account once we start selling your products.
We sell your products under our seller account. You still have your own brand store page, your listings say by your brand. The only place where it would say our name is when it says sold by. Less than 1% of shoppers even look at who is selling the products. The reason we would do it under our account instead of yours is that our account is massive and has all the features and marketing levers that Amazon has to offer. If our agreement were ever to come to an end, you would stop shipping to FBA under our name, and start shipping again under your name. All the listings, content, and reviews stay and you can easily start selling your products again.
In our end-of-the-month reporting, it will just show total sales (not broken down by warehousing), but if you really wanted to know that info, we could pull separate reports for you. (Since we are paying sales tax, and we are forecasting out your sales, and letting you know which Amazon dc to ship to, most brands don’t really ask for this info)
We have a video that we made that goes through a sample Amazon sales report. Let our sales team know and we will share it with you.
We typically give you payments every 10th of the month and guarantee it by the 15th. We usually get the official reports from Amazon on the 9th, so just in case there are holidays or if it’s the weekend, it may take a couple of days longer than the 10th. But usually always on the 10th.
Yes, we service brands of all size catalogs, from 1 SKU to thousands of ASINs.
We have a 1-time onboarding fee to build out and optimize up to 25 SKus. Then we get a percentage of incremental sales + a monthly management fee.
Onboarding usually takes 4 weeks. For MAX RESULTS, the only thing you guys are responsible for is making sure the product is sent to Amazon when we need it there. The process is pretty much turnkey from there.
Onboarding for Max Control usually takes 2-4 weeks. We do not start managing international Amazon immediately. We start looking into that once we start managing Amazon U.S for a couple of months. Onboarding those brands could take another 4 weeks depending on a bunch of different factors.
No, you would not have to maintain any software if you do not want to. We have Helium 10, and our customized dashboard should be better than managing by stats. Our software should take care of everything you may need related to your listings Amazon.
Yes, you can change it and add as many warehouse addresses as you want. We send products into Amazon FBA using the shipping address on file.
Yes, you will pay Amazon storage fees to store products in their Amazon FBA system. We will monitor your inventory to make sure we’re not sending too much or too little of your inventory to Amazon. This is why we manage your inventory to make sure we are not sending too much or too little of your products to Amazon.
You ship your products to an Amazon distribution center so the orders can be Fulfilled by Amazon. We let you know how much inventory to ship into Amazon, email you over the shipping labels, and then you send them to Amazon.
In order to sell a 4-pack, you will need to have those items wrapped up together. Amazon will not take it out of a 12-pack unless that is your master case, AND the items are packed in three 4-packs in those cases. So we will only be able to sell 8-packs and 12-packs for now, but that should be fine because you want higher price points on Amazon anyways to help with margins and FBA fees. In addition, Amazon has recently released virtual bundling, which gives us an option to test if there’s demand for this product easily. Then we can scale it to physical bundles.
Products need to have a minimum of a 3-month shelf life for Amazon. If we needed to recall products, we would do an Amazon removal order.
There is no visibility for lot code information because once the lot goes into Amazon, they get comingled with the other lots. Amazon does not use a first in, first out (FIFO) or last in, first out (LIFO) system, they pick and pack at random.
In the beginning, we will have your ship to your nearest Amazon DC. After the sales start coming in, Amazon’s system determines which warehouses to send products to so that people can still get 1-2 day Amazon prime. E.g., if California has 50% of the sales, we are going to have you ship half the inventory to the west coast.
The commission is based on gross product sales. Amazon takes their 15% and we take our fee right off the top. Then your FBA fees and advertising costs get subtracted and the rest gets deposited into your bank account.
If we submit a removal order, this would have nothing to do with what you are allowed to send in under your seller account. If you would like, a good option to avoid is any types of inventory not being available. You can send in your own order right away, once your inventory hits FBA we can submit our removal order.
Amazon doesn’t allow us to just transfer over inventory from your FBA account to ours. We would actually have to do a removal order and then send that product back in under our account. Our onboarding process takes about 1 month, so you should be able to sell through some, if not all, of your current inventory. So there are two options – if there are 4-5 weeks of inventory in Amazon right now, we can just leave it and have you sell-through. If there is more than that, we would have to do a removal order on the remaining amount. Removals are fairly cheap.
It can be FBA or FBM; that’s a plus of managing your seller account.
Yes, you could have your own seller account without any active listings to do manual fulfillments. So if we did MAX RESULTS, this would be the way to go for international manual fulfillment.
Skubana is great for overall inventory management. Shipstation is only really good for using FBA inventory to fulfill Shopify orders.
Amazon will not remove your brand, but you will probably slip in the rankings a little bit. We don’t want to run out of inventory because of this so we try and do our best to keep you in stock at all times
There really is no rule of thumb. It depends on how well advertising is going on and off Amazon. We will be using your 3pl, (or our 3pl) as a backup in case inventory runs out on Amazon – we can switch to FBM and ship directly from the warehouse.
Amazon limits the amount of initial inventory based on size and space. You would have to send the box dimensions over to your account manager to confirm how many units can be sent in initially. Once we start onboarding, we can figure out how many units you can send in for the initial load-in. The limit only increases when sales start going up. This is why we recommend starting earlier – so that your limits can go up for FBA, and you will be set up for success going into your peak selling season.
You would send us all of the assets for the SKUs and we would use a mix of your content and stock images to create new content for you on Amazon.
We do all the description research beforehand as well. We put lots of keywords in titles and do advertisements for various keywords to get you listed ahead of your competitors.
We have multiple ways to request reviews from customers, including but not limited to, every time someone buys a product, we send them automated messages asking for reviews. We can use your email lists and current customers to get more reviews as well by offering them coupons and deep discounts.
There is no way to import outside reviews into Amazon. We do have a bunch of SOPs to get reviews quickly for you guys.
There is no concrete answer on how long it will take to get number 1 rankings on certain keywords because every keyword is different. It depends on how competitive that keyword is. Getting to the first page is possible within the first 4-6 months but getting to number 1 just depends on what your competitors are doing. First-page rankings are always changing as well so that’s why you may see some of those products not having the number 1 ranking anymore. They are still on the first page and show up at the top when advertising which is the important part.
We don’t take photos, but we will repurpose your existing media to be Amazon-compliant and optimized. We will use stock images and photoshop to create cutsheets (lifestyle images + copy) for your brand.
We use Helium 10 or Jungle Scout to look into sales figures & volumes, in addition to our own software.
The advice we mainly have is to get solid video content, and nice high-resolution white background, and lifestyle images. Any images that you see with text on them – we have made for the brand. We don’t take photos, but we use photoshop and stock images to create extra content for you.
We also have SOPs for best practices on Amazon content. Feel free to reach out for those.