Should You Send Free Product to Influencers?

Free product is not free. It costs you what the unit cost to land, plus the freight to send it, plus the hour you spend finding the person and writing to them. Most founders treat gifting as marketing that costs nothing. It is one of the most common reasons a first marketing budget disappears with nothing to show for it.

Should you send free product to influencers?

Yes, but only when you can name what you want back, and only with product you can afford to lose. A gift with no ask is a donation. Send a small number of units to people whose audience already buys your category, ask for something specific in writing, and count what comes back. If you cannot afford to send twenty units and get nothing, you are not ready to gift.

What does a gifted unit actually cost you?

Not your retail price. Your landed cost, plus postage, plus packing.

Landed cost is the number most founders do not have in front of them, and it is the one that decides whether gifting is affordable. If you have never worked yours out line by line, start with landed cost per unit over on Source Haus, because every number in this article sits on top of it.

• The unit itself at landed cost, not the price on your website
• Postage, roughly $12 to $25 for a small parcel in Australia, and a lot more for anything bulky
• Packaging, plus any note or extra you include
• An hour of your time finding the person, writing to them and following up

Say your product retails for $89 and lands at $28. Post it for $14 and that gift cost you $42 of real money. Ten gifts is $420. Thirty gifts is $1,260. That is a real line in your marketing budget and it deserves to be treated like one.

How many sales does a gift need to make before it pays for itself?

Work it out per gift, not across the whole campaign.

Keep going with the $89 product. It lands at $28, so you keep about $61 a sale before fees. Call it $55 once the card fees and the postage bag are out. A $42 gift needs one sale to wash its face. Send ten gifts and you need ten sales across all ten to break even. In practice most gifts return nothing and a small number return a lot.

That maths only works if you know your true margin, and plenty of founders do not. If your pricing was set off a factory quote rather than a landed cost, read how to price a product first, because gifting out of a thin margin is a donation you cannot afford.

So the real question is not whether gifting works. It is whether you can carry twenty misses to find two hits.

Who is actually worth sending to?

• People whose audience already buys the thing you sell, not people with the biggest audience
• Accounts small enough to reply to you personally, because a reply is the best signal you will get
• Customers who already bought and already posted without being asked
• Photographers, stylists and makers whose images you can reuse with permission
• People who show things at your price. If they never show anything over $30 and you sell a $400 piece, you are the wrong brand for them

Follower count is the worst filter available. Comments that read like actual conversations are a much better one.

A gifted post is one form of social proof and it is not the strongest one. Reviews from people who paid do more work, for longer, and they cost you nothing to collect. Here is how to get reviews and social proof from your earliest customers.

What I got wrong

At Incy we sent cots and beds to accounts because the follower numbers looked impressive. Furniture is heavy. Freight on a cot is not $14, and the audience on some of those accounts was never going to spend that kind of money on a nursery.

The worst stretch was the year we said yes to everyone who asked. Requests came in weekly and each one felt like an opportunity. There was no brief, no agreement, no date and no way to tell which sale came from which post. Stock left the warehouse and nothing measurable came back.

What I should have done was send fewer pieces, to fewer people, with one clear ask and a spreadsheet. The mistake was not gifting. The mistake was gifting with no job for the gift to do.

Slow moving stock is a different conversation. If you have styles sitting in boxes, gifting them is often a better move than discounting your whole range, and there are a few other options worth trying first.

What to ask for before you send anything

Put it in writing before the parcel leaves. A short email is enough.

1. 1What you are sending and what it is worth
2. 2What you would like in return. One post and two stories is a normal ask. Be specific
3. 3A rough timeframe. Within four weeks of delivery works
4. 4Permission to reuse their photos and video on your website, in your email and in your paid ads, and for how long
5. 5That the post must be clearly disclosed as gifted

The usage rights are usually worth more than the post. A good creator will shoot better content than most small brands can afford to produce. Being able to use that content for a year is the real return, long after the post has scrolled away.

That content is also the cheapest way to fill the emails you send to people who are not ready to buy yet, which matters more than any single post. If you have not started, build the email list before you send a single parcel.

What the ACCC requires when you gift product in Australia

This is the part most gifting guides skip, and it is the part that can cost you money.

Gifted product creates a commercial relationship. It has to be disclosed. The obligation sits with the creator and with you, because you are the advertiser.

The ACCC swept 118 influencer accounts between 23 January and 3 February 2023. It found 81 percent had posts raising concerns about undisclosed advertising. Home and parenting was one of the sectors it looked at, along with fashion, beauty, food, travel, health and gaming.

In March 2026 the ACCC issued its first penalty in this area. PhotobookShop paid $39,600 under infringement notices, over 107 occasions. The conduct was instructing influencers not to disclose that they had been sent free product worth between $50 and $400. The company had also edited a creator's video review to cut out the parts where she said she was unhappy.

• Ask for plain disclosure. Ad, Advertisement, or Gifted by, in the caption where people actually read it
• Never ask anyone to leave the gift out, or to make the post look organic
• Never edit criticism out of content, whether you paid for it or not
• Keep the email. Your brief is your evidence if anyone ever asks

Vague tags are the exact problem the ACCC named. Sp, spon and collab were all called out as inadequate. Plain words cost you nothing.

When not to send anything

• Before you have margin, because gifting out of a 20 percent margin is a cost you cannot recover
• When they asked you. Inbound requests are almost always the worst returns
• When the item is your most expensive product and you only have a few of them
• Before your site can capture the traffic, because a post sends people once and then it is gone

What I do now

Small batches, and a list.

1. 1Pick ten people a quarter. Ten, not fifty
2. 2Send to customers first. People who already paid and already post
3. 3Write one short email with the ask and the usage rights in it
4. 4Track it in a spreadsheet. Who, what it cost, what came back, what sold
5. 5After two quarters, keep the handful who worked and pay them properly

Paying a small fee for content rights is usually better value than sending three more gifts and hoping.

Gifting is one channel and it is a slow one. Almost every early sale I have watched a founder make came from a conversation rather than a parcel, which is why finding your first 100 customers is the work that comes first.

Free product can work. It works when you know what the unit costs you, who you are sending it to, what you asked for and what came back. Everything else is posting things into the dark and calling it marketing.