How to Save Costs on your eCommerce Packaging in 6 simple steps

Whether you’re selling thousands of products online or even just a few, reducing costs and making refinements where possible are a great way to maintain a good profit margin without increasing the product price.

As we find ourselves still very much in the Covid-19 pandemic, eCommerce selling has become the norm for retailers throughout prolonged periods of store-closures. With this in mind, we’ve outlined 6 simple cost saving steps to consider when it comes to ordering (or re-ordering) your eCommerce packaging.

Understand

Understanding the purpose of your packaging will not only streamline the order process with your supplier, but it will also will help to ensure that you receive exactly what you want out of your packaging.

Is your primary objective functionality or do you need your packaging to deliver a brand experience (or both!)? Are you simply looking for packaging to enable you to transport your products or will the packaging be on display? Is the packaging for a particular event/season such as Christmas? Is this the secondary or tertiary packaging?

Having answers to these questions will help steer you towards what style and type of packaging you will require and ultimately save on multiple redesigns of samples and artworking.

 

Consider

No matter if you are fulfilling your orders yourself or using a fulfilment company, it pays to buy in bulk. While the outset costs may be greater, you’ll be able to save money in the long term and benefit from being able to budget ahead for the coming months.

Whether you’re buying corrugated boxes, internal fittings, or packing tape, this proactive approach will help you cut costs you may not have even known you were incurring. Traditionally speaking in the world of manufacturing, the higher the quantity, the less cost per unit.

Use

Using sustainable or eco-friendly materials are a great way to reduce costs. The cost of reprocessing cardboard is typically less than making it new, so purchasing recycled material is always a cheaper alternative.

Sustainable materials such as corrugated paper are easily reintroduced into the recycling chain. There are also companies that offer free pickups of recycling and even pay for the scrap material.

And if cost saving isn’t enough, there’s the fact you are supporting the worlds environmental problems and it has been proven consumers favour products that have sustainable packaging.

Measure

We’ve all received the box from Amazon, three or four times the size of the product it contains. When people hear the word ‘bespoke’, they often think of the word ‘expensive’.

But, in reality, that is not the case. Having packaging made to measure to fit your product can save on the amount of material that is used in producing them. The less material used, the lower the cost per unit.

You can even save on the need for packaging void fill, bespoke packaging can be designed using internal fittings that provide tailored protection to your products by ensuring that they fit snuggly inside.

Decide

Deciding early-on which print processes to use for your packaging artwork can save you on costs further down the line. Before commissioning a graphic designer to create your packaging artwork, it is important to know which print process you plan to use.

This will enable the designer to create artwork suitable for that process and the machine capabilities of your supplier.

For example, if your graphic designer were to create a 5 colour design for flexo printing but your packaging supplier can only print in 3 colours due to machine capability limitations, the artwork would not be suitable.

If not, you will likely find your packaging suppliers asking you to re-design and supply your packaging artwork suitable for the print process requested.

Store it

When storing paper based packaging, you are going to want to keep it off the ground, for example inside one or more central boxes or having the pallet protected using pallet wrap. This will help to keep it away from pest, dirt and footfall traffic, which could result in packaging damage.

Also avoid storing your packaging in humid or damp areas if possible to keep the paper from becoming moist and lessen any likelihood of reducing the performance of the packaging.

There are many ways companies can reduce costs when it comes to eCommerce packaging solutions, to further discuss these simple steps and anything else, submit an enquiry, or call our dedicated sales team on 01502 513112.