What is Product Sampling? Types, Examples and Tips (2025)

Giving away your product for free can feel controversial. After all, someone has to pay for it—and when it comes to free samples, you eat the cost. But don’t let that dissuade you.

Product samples can introduce your brand to new audiences and encourage repeat purchases. These are all great outcomes for your business and revenues. 

Before you double down and start giving everything away, it may help to understand why freebies hook customers. And more importantly, you might want to know how giving your product out for free leads to paying customers.

What is product sampling?

Product sampling is the process of giving free samples away to customers. The idea is that once they try the product for free, they’ll be more confident in paying full price for the same item. 

Take a skin care brand for example. If it gives free samples of its moisturizer away to customers, they can see the positive results of using it before investing their money into the full-price product. 

Marketers can show other people using the product, back up a product with statistics, and collect influencer endorsements. But sometimes, the only way customers will trust what you’re selling is by trying it themselves. Product samples allow them to do that for free. 

The psychology behind product sampling

When we get a free taste, trial, or sample of a product, we're more likely to buy it later. This happens because of how our brains work, according to psychology and economics research.

• Reciprocity. When brands give us something free, we feel subtly obligated to return the favor with a purchase. Studies show shoppers who receive product samples are significantly more likely to buy, even when the sample has no economic value.
• The Endowment Effect. When people physically engage with a product—even briefly—they begin to assign it greater value. This is known as the endowment effect, a concept introduced by Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler (1990). 
• Perceived risk. Consumers often hesitate to buy unfamiliar products due to fear of wasting money. Sampling removes this uncertainty. According to prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), people are loss-averse—they weigh potential losses more heavily than equivalent gains.
• Exposure effect. The more often people are exposed to something, the more likely they are to develop a preference for it. Psychologist Robert Zajonc demonstrated this in a series of experiments in the 1960s. Known as the mere exposure effect, this principle explains how even a single positive interaction—like trying a sample—can build brand preference. 
• Sensory advantage. Sampling allows brands to leverage sensory marketing, engaging a consumer’s senses to create stronger emotional and memory-based connections. One study found that tactile interaction—touching or handling a product—leads to higher perceived quality and increased purchase likelihood.

Why is product sampling important?

Trial and conversion

Trial is one of the most powerful ways to convert shoppers. Product samples remove barriers to purchase by letting customers try before they buy, whether in-store or online.

In physical retail, samples tap into rational decision-making. Instead of relying on guesswork, shoppers can evaluate your product in real time, increasing confidence and reducing hesitation. That’s why Cornell research found wine tasting customers were 93% more likely to spend an extra $10 and return for repeat purchases.

Trust and credibility 

When your brand is new to a market or sells unusual products, customers often hesitate to buy. Samples help overcome this by letting people try products without risk.

This matters most for products you can't see benefits immediately, like face creams or health supplements. For these products, one sample usually isn't enough. Giving samples that last for 2-3 uses gives customers more time to see how the product works and trust that it's good quality.

Brand awareness

Whether you set up a sample booth in a busy store or slip a free sample into an online order, samples help people discover what you offer.

Samples also make current customers like you more. Strong product branding ensures the goodwill a freebie creates sticks long after the sample is gone. Giving them something new to try without making them buy anything shows you're generous and encourages them to explore more of your products.

As researchers at Cornell found in their wine tasting study, the setting matters too. When you pair free samples with friendly service, one-time shoppers can become loyal fans.

Customer feedback

New products can be tested with a select group of customers via samples. Their reactions, reviews, and repurchase behavior give you insight into what’s working (and what’s not) before a full launch. This type of product testing reveals formula tweaks and packaging fixes before you scale a launch.

Samples tied to post-purchase surveys or follow-up emails can help validate formulations, packaging, or even pricing strategies before a broader rollout. Use an app like Zigpoll or Fairing to run these surveys. 

Customer loyalty

Samples help bring customers back, which is where most retailers make their money. Smile.io found that some 41% of an online store's revenue comes from only 8% of its customers. 

Unlike one-time deals or discounts, samples build positive feelings over time. They create ongoing product discovery, showing customers your brand cares about giving them value, not just making sales.

Types of product sampling methods

Here are the different types of product sample examples you can try. 

In-store

When customers shop in a store, they can test your product right when they're thinking about buying it. This helps them make quick decisions and remember your brand name. 

Costco is famous for its sample stations throughout the warehouse, where employees offer bite-sized portions of foods ranging from pizza and pasta to cheese and desserts.

If you’re offering free samples across multiple channels, like online, in-store, and at pop-ups, integrating everything into a unified commerce solution can simplify operations. 

For example, Shopify POS is part of Shopify’s broader approach to unified commerce, letting you track sample inventory and customer data across all the places you hand out freebies. A unified product information management system keeps every sample SKU, description, and compliance detail consistent across those channels.

Event-based

Offering samples at festivals or trade shows lets you reach people interested in finding new products. The fun atmosphere at events makes people more likely to remember your brand and tell others about what they tried.

When giving out these samples, Spencer Lynn, northeast regional manager at KOS Naturals, advises, “Step out from behind your booth and get in front of it, hand out some samples in the aisles.”

“If it’s really slow, I’ll grab some of our single-serving sample sachets and walk the floor myself and hand them out as I go. Sometimes people will come to seek out our booth after that to find out more info.”

Online

Online sampling might include free software trials or try before you buy programs. This convinces unsure online shoppers to make their first purchase by letting them experience your product before fully committing.

One example is from Gemist, a jewelry brand that sells made-to-order rings and earrings. It offers a Try-On Experience through its online store to let customers choose three ring styles to try for up to 14 days.

Direct mail

Sending samples directly to potential customers' homes helps you reach people without needing a store. 

For example, a natural skincare company sends sample-sized versions of their face wash, and moisturizer to targeted zip codes where their market research shows potential customers with interest.

Pop-ups

Pop-up sampling locations let you test different neighborhoods or customer groups without opening a permanent store. People often see pop-ups as special, limited-time opportunities, making them more excited to try what you offer.

Influencer

Sending your product to influencers lets you benefit from the voices people already trust. Influencers often share their experience with your product across their social media accounts, helping you reach many more potential customers.

Healthish's influencer marketing strategy involves sending free products to relevant influencers, such as fitness vloggers, fashion influencers, and other groups related to its target market. These creators then share images and videos of its products online, but only if they love the product.

View this profile on Instagram

Healthish Time Marked Water Bottle💧 (@healthish) • Instagram photos and videos

 

Add-on

Including free samples of other products when customers order something helps them discover more of what you sell. 

An online cosmetics store includes sample-sized versions of their newest lip gloss colors with every order over $25, introducing customers to products they might not have considered purchasing on their own. Apply insights from bundling for retail to turn curiosity into higher‑value carts at checkout.

Product sampling tips 

Ready to offer free samples to your potential customers? Here are six product sampling tips to make sure you’re offering miniature versions that convince customers to buy the product at full price. 

Define your target audience first

Everything you do in your retail store revolves around your target audience. Product sampling is no different. Always consider what your ideal customer wants. Use the answer to decide on the product offered as a free sample. 

Beauty retailer Z Skin Cosmetics, for example, has samples of almost every product it sells. Every customer who places an order gets a free sample included in their package. 

However, its co-founder and CEO, Ryan Zamo, says, “We base which sample to put in with the order based on what they ordered. For example if they ordered our eye cream, we might include a sample of our neck cream, products that we recommend using together.”

When deciding which products to offer, Ryan advises to “make sure it’s relevant to their purchased items.

“Think of it as marketing the item: you want to spend money to attract new buyers that have expressed interest in it. You would be throwing away money if you just targeted people with zero interest in an item. Think of sampling in the same way.” 

💡 PRO TIP: Want to find related products faster? Go to your Shopify admin and create tags to group items by product type, collection, use-case, and more. Tags will help you find sample products to compliment a customer’s purchase at checkout quicker.

Establish clear goals

Regardless of what you’re offering and how, you need a plan for the product samples you want to offer. Consider the following before offering your inventory to customers without rhyme or reason:

• What is the purpose of offering free samples? What do you hope to achieve? Knowing this will help inform decisions about what to offer, when, and for how long.
• Who do you want to try your product? The answer will help you understand what you need to do to make sure the product gets to the right shoppers. (Perhaps you want to introduce your product to athletes; in this case, sponsoring a 5k race and handing out your product at the finish line might be appropriate.)
• How will you measure success? You need a way to track your product sample campaigns, and whether or not they helped drive business. That means thinking strategically (and avoiding a shotgun approach to free samples).

📌 GET STARTED: To measure a product sample’s impact on sales, go to Shopify admin and view the Sales by product report. From here, you can see if there’s a spike in a product’s sales after offering free samples.

For many retailers, the aim of product sampling is to engage people who are too nervous to pay full price for an item. The product should be good enough to convince them otherwise. If that’s the case for your store, use sample-to-purchase conversion rates to determine whether your strategy is successful. 

Be mindful of timing

When offering product samples, timing is everything. Make sure you're giving people enough time to see the benefits of it first-hand. 

The reminders you send to product samples that encourage them to purchase the full-size item, leave it too long, and repurchase the item will no longer be top of mind. You might have to convince them to buy the full-priced version (or take another free sample) to remind them of how great it was. 

Similarly, push for the sale too quickly, and you risk bombarding potential customers with marketing messages before they've had a chance to experience the product themselves. Lessons from flash sales and drops help you time follow‑up offers for maximum impact.

Look at your sales data to see the average time period between taking a free sample and buying the full-priced version. If you're offering a sample size of your essential oils, for example, you might find that people repurchase two weeks later when they've run out. A few days before that two-week trial period is the perfect time to send a purchase reminder.

Be strategic about sampling location

The layout of your retail store has a major impact on the way shoppers interact with your free samples. 

Avoid the back of your store or places where very few shoppers visit. Instead, position your sampling station in a place that’s visible to in-store shoppers and passersby, such as: 

• By the entrance to attract people as they first enter the store.
• In the window to encourage passersby to drop in and claim a free sample, even if they didn’t intend on visiting.
• At the checkout desk to nudge those making a purchase to take a free sample of another item they’ll later return to buy. 

If you’re operating a larger store, take a page from Costco’s book and have sampling stations dotted around the most popular routes. A station at the halfway point of their shopping route could entertain shoppers mid-shop. Staff armed with deep product knowledge convert curious samplers into loyal buyers on the spot.

Offer samples online

We’ve touched on the fact that product samples don’t have to be limited to brick-and-mortar stores. Ecommerce businesses can offer free samples to shoppers, helping them overcome a major challenge of buying online: not being able to interact with the product before paying full price for it. 

At worst, online shoppers try the product by purchasing it and later returning it. The 30-day money-back guarantee many brands offer incentivizes this shopping habit, making ecommerce returns a huge logistical (and financial) nightmare for retailers.

PRO TIP: If your ecommerce store is powered by Shopify, use the Product Samples app to offer samples to online shoppers without the logistical headaches. If people can only qualify for these free samples when ordering full-priced products, you can incentivize the purchase and absorb shipping costs for the sample.

Include sampling in loyalty programs

Earlier, we mentioned that product samples have a domino effect on customer loyalty. Those repeat customers are sources of consistent revenue for many retailers. So, why not take that one step further and use small samples as an incentive to join a loyalty program?

Some direct-to-consumer brands base their entire business model on this strategy. Monthly subscription boxes by Birchbox and Glossybox contain free miniature versions of popular beauty products. The contents of each box change monthly, so customers are incentivized to keep their subscriptions. 

Common product sampling mistakes

You’re convinced: you want to use samples to attract new customers, introduce different audiences to your product, and entice existing shoppers to buy more. But before you allow your customers to sample everything in the store, know that offering too much can backfire.

Offering too many samples

When people are faced with just one or a handful of choices, making a selection feels manageable. If you’re not forcing customers to choose, but allowing them to sample multiple products, a small selection feels reasonable and comfortable.

But when you start adding in more and more choices, our ability to simply pick one declines. Eventually, we reach a point where we make no decision at all because of our inability to handle how overwhelmed we feel by all the choices. It’s a psychological phenomenon called the paradox of choice.

Stick to offering one sample or a predetermined selection. Removing the obstacle of too much choice will make customers more likely to take you up on the offer—and purchase the full-price item when they realize how good it is. 

💡 PRO TIP: Be intentional with the products you sample. Consider reserving samples for new products as part of your launch strategy or for products with higher margins. To spot high-margin products, view the Profit by product variant SKU report in Shopify admin.

Not including a clear next step

Think of your free product samples as the first step of the purchase process. People receive the free sample, enjoy it, and want to purchase the full-price version. But when they run out of the free sample, reordering falls to the bottom of their priority list. 

A cardinal sin of product sampling is forgetting to include a next step for samplers and leaving the decision of whether they visit your website and purchase the full price version in their hands. 

Remove this opportunity from your strategy by entering all product samplers into an email marketing sequence. If you’re offering toothpaste samples, for example, give shoppers seven days to try the product. Once those seven days are up, send an email reminding them to purchase the full-size version.

Not considering the cost impact

Free product giveaways come at a cost. When deciding whether to offer product samples to your customers, consider the price of the actual sample and any logistical fees you’ll pay to deliver it, such as posting (or returns if you’re following Warby Parker’s try-at-home method.)

Kenko Tea is a Japanese matcha tea brand that offers 30-gram sample bags to its wholesale customers. Director Sam Speller says one of its biggest product sampling mistakes was “not getting products in a smaller sample size that you can give out in a cost-effective manner. 

“For years, we only offered our wholesale offering with fairly strict minimum orders and didn’t have smaller sample sizes. I think this was a mistake.”

For this reason, Sam recommends, “When working with your suppliers for consumable products, see if you can get smaller sample sizes for your existing products so you can give out samples more freely to keep expenses down.”

Start offering free samples at your store

Now that you’ve seen some examples of free samples in action, you can make choices about whether a product sampling marketing strategy is right for your business.

Remember to match the product samples with items previously purchased, position the sampling station in a high-traffic area of your store, and schedule reminders for customers to purchase the full-sized (and full-priced) versions once the sample runs out.