Samples with or without freight charge?
When you are trying to setup a new business or expand with a new client, we have to do research weather what is the buyers buying power? If you had heard about this buyer from other people in your same field or you knew it is a giant buyer then its worth you send them samples via express because you don't save few dollars when you can find much much more.
On the other way if you don't know much about the client then sending via local isn't a problem at lot due to now a days local airways do provide good services and beside buyer usually don't ask what way are you going to send the samples if so then it means probably the buyer just want your samples and not business.
We have a few customer keep on asking for free sample and ask us to quote a lot of things especially those customer from procurement services company. Some of them we check in our system it show that their account is negative, that mean we spend more money to make and send their sample for free than their paid order for years. We still keep on the relationship because they have access to a few customer that we are not able to penetrate in the US. Until now no big orders is coming in and they only order to us what we have under quoted. They also asked us to keep some stocks of raw material for them but the order never come. I big company like ours are willing to invest on the samples but I don't think any smaller company is willing to do that. Sometime I think that customer is taking advantage of us and is marginlizing us.
