As online shopping and the world of e-commerce takes over, the standard of packaging has increased too. Ecommerce businesses are forced to step up and ensure that their e-commerce packaging is unique, durable and sustainable.
Despite this, it’s important to find a balance between offering high-quality packaging and sticking to a budget – there’s no good spending a fortune on highly customized packaging if it will have a huge impact on your profit.
Here are some useful ways to offer unique and impressive e-commerce packaging, without breaking the bank…
Cardboard boxes
While corrugated cardboard boxes are the most commonly used packaging material, they can still make a good impression on consumers.
The structure of cardboard boxes themselves are by no means unique in structure, but boxes can be customized in a variety of ways to represent your brand.
One way to effectively use cardboard boxes for your e-commerce packaging is to produce them yourself in-house.
There is a wide range of box making machines available that allow businesses to make corrugated boxes of any shape and size, to suit their entire product range.
Kolbus Autobox, for example, provides e-commerce businesses of all sizes with machinery that provides the means for companies to decide the specific diameters of each box and produce them easier to meet order demand.
Cardboard boxes are suited to a wide range of businesses and can be branded up using printing and stamping methods.
There’s not always a need to fork out tons of your business’ budget on uniquely engineered or designed packaging if custom cardboard boxes with your company logo can do the job both safely and affordably.
Don’t bulk buy
If your business offers a wide range of products, don’t assume that it’s cost-effective to bulk buy your e-commerce packaging.
While there may be deals that come with ordering large volumes of packaging materials, you can end up wasting tons of money and losing valuable storage space.
While it’s always important to match the size of your packaging to the specific size of each order, producing your own packaging in-house or ordering packaging in smaller amounts means you can meet order demands, without having to store tons of various box sizes at your workplace.
Custom sleeves
Another creative way to offer custom e-commerce packaging without having to customize your actual boxes is to opt for sleeves instead.
Customized sleeves can be designed and ordered in bulk and allow businesses to use plain boxes and save tons of money on printing. What’s more, packaging sleeves are a great way for you to increase your sustainability, as customers can reuse your boxes and only need to dispose of the sleeve itself.
Sleeves are great for businesses that want to get creative with the branding of their packaging, without having to spend a considerable amount on the printing of their materials.
Inserts
These days, eCommerce packaging isn’t just about the external appearance of your shipments, the inside counts too.
For example, if you simply put a product into a cardboard box and hope for the best, your customers won’t be impressed and the chances are that your product will be damaged en route. Packaging inserts can be protective yet personal, giving you the opportunity to add extra customization, thank you notes and even call to actions to your e-commerce packaging.
For consumer-facing brands, the unboxing experience is now valued more than ever. If you make the interior of your e-commerce packaging impressive, you can benefit from free exposure on social media and see your brand reputation improve.
Using inserts in your e-commerce packaging can be cheap and help you save money in the long run, as you will receive fewer returns or complaints due to products being damaged in the shipping process.
Stickers and tape
To finish off these e-commerce packaging tips, there are a number of other ways to brand up your packaging without having to customize the packaging material itself.
You can use stickers or custom tape to secure your packages, again allowing customers to reuse your boxes for other purposes.
The cost of stickers and tape will depend on the volume but can be far cheaper than using ink to print each box.
