How to choose a box

It turns out that this would be a year that I would spend learning new things.  The pandemic left our entire economy in a panic and many companies ended up working on a lot of ecommerce areas instead of the normal selling style of brick and mortar.  It has been a whirl wind of scared businessman not knowing what to do and I can only imagine what it would feel like to have to pivot from a 100% brick and mortar to e commerce overnight. Luckily, my company was already online and we simply ramped up our shipping production.  This did leave us in a bit of a hard spot, because there were lots of items that we did not originally sell online because of their size and weight.  It turns out that the costs of shipping those items greatly makes people not want to purchase them. We also found out that after shipping a few of them that our normal system was simply not going to work. So I want to take you through how we chose the boxes we did to ship out heavy items.

 

First we had to do some research.  In all honesty I didn't think that there was a difference in cardboard boxes and regular cheap moving boxes but I was wrong.  There is actually multiple types of boxes out there and what we actually think of as a cardboard box is actually a corrugated box.  This distinction was really a big deal in the packaging world and it looks like most companies that do this type of work for a living have different ratings systems and versions of corrugated boxes.  Cardboard is actually more like a cereal box which is flimsy and thin.  That is how it was explained to me.  So that was a different search altogether.  Once we found this out we were able to located corrugated box makers which were usually packaging supply companies.

 

Now to be honest the more we learned the more we realized that we needed a professional to simply let us know what weight of box we would need.  I couldn't belive the details in the system and I simply decided to call up a packaging supply store online and ask some questions. I am not sure why I didn't do this sooner but they had all the answers and more for us.  They literally do this for billion dollar big box stores so we decided to trust them and they were right.  We found the right type of boxes for our super heavy duty products.  They ended up giving us a deal on the boxes that would hold our items due to the fact we needed so many.

 

It turns out that putting all of our packaging supplies items together on the same order and getting a discount made up for the broken items we shipped out with cheap moving boxes.  So it was a lesson learned and we also have a way to make good margins while still shipping out these boxes safely.  That really is what it comes down to and in the end it was a fantastic move for us. It is also currently a competitive advantage against our competitors. It is one that we don't intent to let the know about anytime soon, but I am guessing they will figure it out eventually.