If you’re an eCommerce seller, you’ve certainly invested time and money to drive customers to your website, design a great checkout flow, boost conversion rates, and get your buyers to complete their purchases.
You’ve also put in the work to offer your customers competitive shipping options and rates to foster brand loyalty and keep them coming back for more.
The last thing you want is to jeopardize the shopping experience by delivering products that have been damaged in transit to your customer’s doorstep.
Delivering a damaged product can cost you dearly, with customer dissatisfaction, bad reviews, and product returns affecting your sales, revenue, and brand image. It’s for this reason that cutting costs on packaging at the expense of product safety is a bad move for your business.
To help you safeguard your products and deliver a stellar shipping journey from start to finish, we’ve put together a list of essential steps to keep your products safe and secure in their packaging—all while keeping shipping costs down and ensuring customer satisfaction.
- Analyze your product’s packaging requirements
Because every product is unique, different items may have their own packaging requirements. Is the product fresh? If so, it may need to be shipped in a box with dry ice to maintain crispness. Is it fragile? You’ll need peanuts, foam, or bubble wrap. Do you sell unusually shaped products? You may need to use a rectangular external box along with fillers and wraps to fill up the void spaces.
Whatever your product, make sure you take its unique properties into consideration when selecting your packaging.
- Choose packaging material wisely
Your packaging will depend on various elements, such as product weight and material.
Heavy and fragile items ship best in double or triple layered cardboard boxes to ensure safety during transport. When selecting your box, you should also check its weight capacity, which is usually printed at the bottom of the box.
Non-fragile items and products made of flexible material with no fixed shape, such as t-shirts, can simply be wrapped in tissue paper and shipped in poly-mailer bags.
To protect your products from dirt and wet conditions, make sure you place them in plastic bags before placing them inside your cardboard external packaging.
- Leave no empty space, but do not overfill your box
One crucial step to optimizing your packaging is ensuring you pick the correct box size for your product. Not only will shipping in a too-large box drive your shipping costs up (and strain the environment), but it will also cause the products to move inside the box during transit, potentially damaging your customer’s items.
Once you’ve picked the perfect box, use sufficient filler material to prevent movement. At the same time, make sure you don’t overfill the box as that can actually cause it to burst during transport.
The general rule of thumb here is to leave 2 inches of cushion around your product to provide adequate protection while eliminating waste.
- Use the right sealing material
Once your products are placed in the right packaging, they need to be sealed with the right material. If you’re shipping your items in a box, choose tape that is at least 2 inches wide.
For lightweight products, you can simply use a poly-mailer bag with a built-in adhesive strip.
- Seal your box with the H-taping method
To effectively secure your shipping box and prevent the flaps from accidentally opening during transit, seal it using the H-taping method.
This involves applying tape across all open seams of your box, creating an H-shape on both, the top and bottom of the box. Remember that the heavier your box, the more tape you’ll need to use to secure the package.
In this video, discover expert insights on how to optimize your product packaging process to ensure they reach your customers in perfect condition, every time.
Final Thoughts
An effective packaging strategy ensures both product safety and cost savings.
Ultimately, no one wants to overpay for shipping, and using the correct package size for your products helps you avoid dimensional weight pricing. Consider both, the size of the item you’re shipping and also how fragile it is, and choose your packaging accordingly.
It goes without saying that fragile items need more cushioning, which takes up more space, so search for packaging that allows just enough room for the padding materials. Aim to keep the package as small as possible, without compromising the safety of its contents.
If you’re looking to reduce your shipping costs even further, we’re here to help you explore your options, so you can leverage eShipper’s preferred rates and protect your bottom line without compromising on customer satisfaction. Contact us to get started!
