Are Boxes and Tape Hurting Your Company?

It is always interesting to see what ways companies to survive and thrive.  It has been a topic written about and professed on for centuries and lately, it has been the smaller things instead of corporate structure that have saved companies from going under.  The simple fact is that with many companies transitioning into eCommerce business in 2020 that the little things like where you are getting your packaging supplies from is ending up being the difference in surviving and going bankrupt.  This is why I think this topic is so important and maybe vital in keeping your companies shipping department thriving and giving you a competitive advantage.  But what are the things to look for in your company and what types of products may cause such a huge shift in profitability.  I plan on going over just a few here today and hope to give you an idea of the things you should be looking at to stay ahead of the business game this year.

 

The first thing you need to really think about is your shipping department.  This is the area that will most likely make or break your margins and allow you to keep inventory in or get extra marketing out of your current cash.  The fact is that now every single item you sell will have to be shipped and if you are not keeping your shipping department moving and operating at peak performance then you are losing out.  One area we found in our company was that the simple process of taping our boxes changed our budget drastically.

 

Normally we purchased all of our packaging supplies from Amazon and just ended up using regular tape.  Some of our packages would spend 10 to 15 strips of packing tape on each box going out.  We really didn't think much of it but we saw that any returns we received happened to be on boxes that only got 3 to 5 pieces of tape.  So we talked with the packer who always overpacked and he knew that the weight of the items in those boxes was too much for the tape we were using.  This led me to start calling around to major companies in the box world to see what was going on.

 

I talked with the customer service team of a huge online-only company and they talked about different packing tapes and the thicknesses and even gum tape.  The thought of these different tapes never crossed our minds.  They were more expensive and after we went through our product weight and shape and the boxes we were using they made a suggestion.  They suggested we try this thicker more expensive tape but only to use one strip per side.  They swore up and down it would hold and be even stronger than 15 strips.  They did the math and we would save about 35% of the cost with one strip per side and the machine that cut it to the direct length of the box would increase speed by 60%.  These were big boasts, but this company had done this thousands of times and proven the math and they were right. 

We trained our team in one day and told them only to use one piece per side.  They liked the quickness and were skeptical.  But we ended up packing almost twice as many items that day and saved 35% in tape costs. That was a competitive advantage and it is awesome.