Today almost everything that we ship requires various kinds of packaging materials and the sole purpose of packaging materials is not to ship the items by safeguarding them. It actually also helps in optimizing time, reducing cost, and cutting waste. So, when buying the packaging materials there are a number of things that you must pay attention to. Beginning from the warehouse shelf to the customer’s front door, the packaging materials play an extremely important role and it is therefore important to ensure what is the best way to buy, store and ship various kinds of packaging materials so that it can be ensured that the packaging items bought are easily managed and used effectively.
1. Optimize Inventory: Buy Smart, Store Smarter
When planning to buy various kinds of packaging materials such as cardboard boxes or bubble wrap rolls, it is extremely important to ensure that you buy these items in bulk. When you buy these items in bulk, the cost of these items can be reduced significantly and this will help in ensuring that you spend less on buying the packaging materials and yet are able to avail the same level of safety. But the question is not merely buying the packaging materials but also ensuring that the items are effectively safeguarded and stored so that they can be used as and when required.
- If you have bought different types of bubble wrap rolls, they can be effectively stored in the vertical storage racks. Doing this will help in ensuring that the items are easily organised and also findable when needed.
- Space is extremely important and therefore when planning to store the cardboard boxes, try to safeguard these boxes in the form of flat-packed options to conserve space.
- Overstocking is a really bad option and therefore in order to do away with this try to make sure that you mark out the peak season. Only try to stock these items during the upcoming peak season specialty items
2. Set Up Efficient Packing Stations
Lack of efficiency costs money and when it comes to huge businesses, the costs get even more larger. It is therefore important to ensure that you have well organised and efficiently managed packing station. This ensures that the packaging materials that you have bought in bulk are managed effectively and used without much hassle.
A few important packaging materials require organising options such as the ones listed below. These organisational strategies will help in quick packaging and also ensure safety of the packaging materials.
- Dispensers for bubble wrap rolls (wall-mounted or table-integrated)
- Stacks of the most-used box sizes, pre-folded for speed
- Handy tools: cutters, strong tape, labels, and void fill close at hand
3. Use the Right Box Size — Every Time
You might have noticed that at times when the parcel arrives, the packaging boxes are quite larger in size. Often even for items which are quite small. In such cases, the boxes are a waste of resource, take more space while being shipped and also requires more amount when being shipped due to the unnecessary added weight.
- Higher shipping fees (dimensional weight pricing)
- Increased need for void fill
- Greater risk of in-transit damage due to movement
In order to solve this issue, always ensure that you create a size matrix that ensures what is the actual size of the items which is to be shipped and then pack them in the boxes of their size accordingly. If you are shipping heavier or fragile items, the double wall cardboard boxes along with the added protection of the bubble wraps can be used. Unnecessarily using large boxes is not required.
4. Cushion with Purpose
Whatever the items is and however safe your mode of transportation is, there are always hight chances of the items getting damaged while in transit due to several factors such as manhandling, jerk, accidents and various other situations. If such circumstances occur, complaining will not always solve the issue. Prevention is always better than cure and therefore you need to ensure that you have the right padding done and wrapped around the items which can safeguard them from all kinds of damages.
- Fragile items: use small bubble wrap for tighter, more protective cushioning.
- Large or heavy items: large-bubble wrap absorbs bigger shocks.
- Electronics: anti-static bubble wrap prevents static discharge damage.
Summing Up
To sum up, there are various kinds of packaging solutions available these days but what is more important is the fact that even these packaging materials require proper organisation and arrangement. Getting this done will help in ensuring that all the investment done in buying the packaging materials in bulk is worth is. You can buy these packaging materials in bulk at wholesale rates grom Packaging Midlands in the UK and the ensure a safe and systematic organisation which will help you in keeping packaging materials ever ready for your business.
