Table of Contents
** Minutes
Bypassing 30% tariffs by leveraging ShipBob’s Section 321 solution
Receiving attentive, hands-on onboarding support
Achieving $40K in cost-savings in our first month and 50% shorter dock-to-stock times
Saving money with better pricing and transparent billing compared to our old fulfillment partner
Bundling products to simplify the shopper and picking experience
Learn how artistic equipment brand Canvas partners with ShipBob to save money on duties and tariffs, achieve transparent billing, and more.
Customer Profile
Canvas is an Alabama-based specialty artistic equipment brand on a mission to help creators make their best work. The brand’s hallmark product, a phone-mounting lamp, enables artists to capture beautiful videos at their desk. Featuring a ring light with 3 color temperatures, a 6-axis positioning and angling system, and a weighted base, the Canvas Lamp replaces thousands of dollars of equipment and saves space with a sleek, minimalist design.
Key metrics
- 30% saved on importing inventory with each shipment
- Over $45,000 saved in the first month of leveraging Section 321
- 50% faster dock-to-stock times
About Canvas
Stuart Jones always wanted to open his own ecommerce store. Even though his job as a videographer kept him busy, he was constantly coming up with new ideas for products and thought it would be fun to try his hand at entrepreneurship.
One day, Stuart and his wife combined his day job and his dreams into a single product: a lamp stand was designed to hold an artist’s phone above their work, so they could illuminate and record their creative process. As soon as the product launched, the pair knew they had a hit.
What started as a modest Shopify store operating out of a guest bedroom exploded into uncontrollable growth. In their second year of business, Canvas’ sales grew eightfold. In their third year, sales tripled again. And they’ve kept on scaling ever since.
We sat down with Stuart to discuss how ShipBob has helped Canvas support their scale by cutting costs through Section 321, competitive pricing, and more.
Bypassing 30% tariffs by leveraging ShipBob’s Section 321 solution
As told to ShipBob by Stuart Jones, Co-Founder of Canvas.
As an American brand based in Alabama that manufactures our products in China and ships orders to the US, the expense that’d really hurt us when I would look over our business’s financial statements was duties and taxes.
Every time we import goods to the US, we would get hit with a 25% tariff fee right off the bat, plus another 6% standard merchandizing tariff. When we imported $100,000 of goods, we had to pay more than $30,000 out of pocket just to get inventory into the US to ship locally to our customers.
For a company of our size, that tariff is a big deal – we are certainly not at the scale where we can just pay $30,000 without batting an eye.
I considered manufacturing our products somewhere else, but finding reliable, quality-controlled manufacturing outside of China that was even remotely affordable was almost impossible. We were stuck with high duties and taxes.
When we were already a ShipBob customer using one of their Georgia fulfillment centers, we found out about ShipBob’s recent Section 321 solution. Section 321 is a piece of legislation designed to give smaller businesses like ours a way to bypass tariffs when we’re shipping products directly to our customers in the US. As long as the goods in an order are worth $800 or less, that order can cross the US border and ship to the customer duty-free.
ShipBob helps merchants like us leverage this legislation using their network, technology, and expertise. We now import our inventory to their bonded warehouse in Tijuana, Mexico, so it never technically enters the US in bulk. When orders come through, they’re picked, packed, and labeled at the Tijuana facility, transported across the border, and shipped to customers from ShipBob’s US hubs.
“Duties and taxes are the cost of doing business, but they’re a huge expense and ate into our bottom line. Leveraging Section 321 through ShipBob was a great way for us to avoid those seemingly unavoidable expenses.”
Stuart Jones, Co-Founder of Canvas
Receiving attentive, hands-on onboarding support
Onboarding to ShipBob’s Section 321 solution was super quick. Getting our products prepared for shipping was really easy – we opted to send them to ShipBob’s Tijuana warehouse in batches, and it’s been a very smooth process.
Plugging into ShipBob’s technology and infrastructure was almost instantaneous. There’s not much to it – we basically had everything already in the system. We had our HS codes and customs information already set up in the ShipBob dashboard since we ship internationally, so it was really just ShipBob’s team enabling a few things on the backend and giving us the green light.
The support we received during onboarding was stellar. We had two Kevins helping us – one on the product side and one on the freight and logistics side – and they were incredibly attentive and hands-on throughout the whole process. We also have Andrew, our dedicated account manager now, and he’s been very responsive and easy to work with.
Achieving $40K in cost-savings in our first month and 50% shorter dock-to-stock times
The cost-savings we’ve achieved so far through ShipBob’s Section 321 solution have been phenomenal. We’ve shipped 2 containers to ShipBob’s Tijuana facility, which totaled $150,000 of inventory – and because we’re not paying duties on it, we’ve saved over $45,000. And that’s in just one month!
“Every single time we import a new container or even smaller LTL shipments, we’re going to be saving that 30% right off the top. Long term, it’s going to be astronomical how much money ShipBob’s Section 321 solution saves us.”
Stuart Jones, Co-Founder of Canvas
ShipBob’s geographic footprint is also great for us because our biggest product market is the West Coast. Tijuana is very close to ShipBob’s hub in Southern California, which gives us great access to the West Coast of the US. If we only imported stock to the ShipBob fulfillment center in Georgia that we were using before 321, we would be shipping all California-bound orders Zones 7 or 8, which is expensive. So even though we’re technically having to pay a little more to get things shipped from Mexico to America compared to fulfilling within the US directly, we’re seeing a net savings per unit shipped because most orders are shipping to Zone 1 or 2 once they cross the border.
It now takes us less time to get inventory from China into ShipBob’s 321 fulfillment center because Tijuana is closer to China than the Southeast US. Since we’re based in Alabama and close to the East Coast of the US, we used to send stock from China through a port in the Southeast US. That would take at least 45 to 50 days (sometimes as much as 90 days). Freighting inventory from China to Tijuana has taken us less than 30 days on average. It’s nearly a 50% shorter transit time to get inventory into a fulfillment center, which has been huge for us.
Saving money with better pricing and transparent billing compared to our old fulfillment partner
Beyond the cost-savings we achieve by minimizing duties and customs fees via Section 321, we’re also saving a lot of money on fulfillment in general with ShipBob.
We used to work with a different fulfillment provider, but their service was way too expensive and we just couldn’t afford it. It was one of our biggest expenses, so as we were trying to find ways to cut costs over the past year, we wanted to see what other options were out there – and that led us to ShipBob!
“ShipBob’s pricing has been a lot more reasonable for us. Oftentimes, the end cost has been what we were quoted in our initial conversations nearly to the penny, so we’ve been very, very happy with the reliable service, transparency, and the economical pricing structure that ShipBob has in place. It’s a less expensive service, but even higher quality. It’s so much easier to plan cash flow, and the whole system is a better fit for us.”
Stuart Jones, Co-Founder of Canvas
ShipBob’s billing is also so much more transparent and easy-to-predict. With our previous provider, there was no way to know how much we paid for a shipment to a customer for at least a month. If we had any questions about a charge, we had to remember to go back and check it on the next month’s invoice by digging into an Excel spreadsheet, finding the specific order, and looking at the price. It was very, very tedious, so we rarely ever did it. Plus, by that point, the orders had been received and opened – there’s not a lot you can do a month later.
With ShipBob, it’s completely different. Every single day, we can look at what we were charged and review each line item in real time through our ShipBob dashboard. As soon as an order is labeled, you can click on it and it tells you exactly how much it costs, and then you get charged for it the next day.
Bundling products to simplify the shopper and picking experience
ShipBob’s dashboard is also simpler to use than our previous fulfillment provider’s. It’s user- friendly, cleaner, and more straightforward. There’s a lot of different ways to sort and display data, so you can hone in on what’s important to you. The support portal is also great – if there’s ever an issue, it’s easy to get it addressed and resolved.
The thing I love most about ShipBob’s dashboard is the product bundling capability. I can’t explain how many conversations we’ve had internally trying to figure our bundling before we worked with ShipBob. You would not believe how hard it was to configure bundles so that the customer sees it as one unit, but it would get split into different picks when it got to the old 3PL’s fulfillment center.
But with ShipBob, it’s so simple. You log on to your dashboard, put whatever products you want in a bundle, and it’s created as its own “primary item” on Shopify with the composite products as sub-items. When an order comes through, it triggers the system and gets fulfilled seamlessly. It’s super easy – that alone would have been enough to make me want to switch to ShipBob!
What’s next for Canvas
ShipBob’s Section 321 solution has been such a huge cost-saver for us that my goal is to ship as many orders as possible out of the Tijuana facility. With the money we’ve saved and will continue to save, we’re excited to keep broadening our product selection and expanding our offerings for all things content creation.
For the past few years, it’s been about all we can do to keep up with demand. Now that we’re more stable, we can afford to take a step back and plan what we want our business to look like long-term.
One of our superpowers is being a hub for small creative entrepreneurs, so we want to become more of an active value-add and resource for those companies. We’re thrilled to help build their brands as we build ours, and be the sort of partner to them that ShipBob has been for us.
Canvas’ team at ShipBob
Henrique Fereirra
Makenna is the Account Executive who helped Canvas get started with ShipBob.
Andrew Stern
Andrew is the Senior Implementation Engineer who onboarded Canvas to ShipBob.
Andrew Costello
Andrew is the Merchant Success Manager at ShipBob who supports Canvas.
Get started with ShipBob
Want to improve your ecommerce fulfillment strategy and scale your business? Discover if ShipBob is the right fit for your brand and request a fulfillment quote below.
This case study includes a general description of one merchant’s experience with utilizing Section 321 and ShipBob fulfillment services. All information, content, and materials available on this site are for general informational purposes only and are not, and are not intended to be legal, tax or customs compliance advice. The information, content, and materials on this site should not be a substitute for the advice from your attorney, licensed customs broker, or tax advisor. ShipBob is not a licensed customs broker, and it does not provide customs advice, file customs entries, advance customs duties on an importer’s behalf, or perform any other “Customs Business” as that is defined in 19 CFR 111.1. You should consult with a licensed customs broker or attorney for advice about your obligations related to U.S. Customs.
