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6 Ways You Can Protect Your Products During Shipment

There are likely thousands of companies around the world shipping products at any given moment. However, not all of those companies practice the same degree of care and planning when it comes to protecting those shipments.

For many kinds of oversized, overweight or unusually shaped products, using the right methods for securing packages in transit is a unique challenge. If you buy, sell or otherwise handle larger types of freight, here are six recommendations for keeping things safe and sound after they leave your dock.

1. Mind Your Edges and Corners

For some of us, receiving small parcels in the mail is a daily occurrence. Hand-carry items are usually simpler to protect than something heavier and bulkier. What can you do when you’ve got a piece of furniture, an oversized object with protruding corners, or an unusually sized component destined for an engine?

Items like these, with edges and other elements that might incur damage themselves — or damage their surroundings in transit — deserve special care. Thankfully, it’s a simple enough matter to reinforce the corners of furniture and other delicate items with wooden planks or high-ply cardboard.

For other types of items, it’s best to use a second shipping carton with space in between them as a buffer. You can fill the empty space with Ranpak paper, sealed air, or even tarps and blankets.

2. Try a Different Cardboard

Cardboard is a common enough material for shipping small components and products, but it’s not out of the question to use cardboard shipping cartons for bulkier items like appliances and machinery. You simply need to know which grade of cardboard to choose.

Double-wall cardboard is five plies thick. For large items, this is probably the minimum thickness you’ll want to consider. For best results, ask for triple-wall cardboard, which is seven plies thick, when sending or receiving items.

The benefits are twofold: First, thicker cardboard offers greater rigidity. Second, cardboard with a higher ply count does a better job shrugging off humidity and moisture. That means less chance of your sensitive materials being compromised by the elements.

3. Choose the Right Pallets and Use Them Correctly

Pallets made from wood or plastic are a common sight around warehouses and distribution centers. However, not every pallet is created equal — and even if they were, it doesn’t mean your staff is using them as intended or abiding by established best practices.

If you rely on pallets for moving your products around the country or the globe, here are some pointers to ensure they’re not causing more headaches than they’re worth:

Discard wooden pallets with missing planks and loose or protruding nails immediately. These aren’t just a safety risk. Sharp edges can catch on shipping cartons and products themselves, causing damage.
Consider switching to pallets with a four-way entry for forklifts. This gives equipment operators more options for interacting with the shipment and further reduces the risk of injury and damage to the products. Employees won’t have to rotate or shift the pallet before the forklift can approach.

Pay close attention to the distance between planks on your pallets, too. Too large a gap can compromise the stability of the product or products stacked atop it.

4. Use Straps or Bands in Conjunction With Stretch Wrap

This is a more common misconception than you might think, but the stretch wrap wasn’t intended as a means to secure your transported goods to the pallet. Instead, it’s a method for adding stability to an ungainly load of freight.

Before bringing stretch wrap into the picture, use banding or straps to secure your load to the pallet. This will protect your items from shifting around or lifting off the pallet in a way that stretch wrap alone will not. After that, apply stretch wrap as usual. Begin at the bottom and circle the pallet five times or so before continuing up the stack of freight.

When receiving large or oversized items, make sure to inspect the shipment for signs of shifting before cutting the bands off. This is another measure that should help cut down on employee injury.

5. Find the Carton Size Sweet Spot

If there’s a common frustration among shipping companies, it’s the challenge of finding a “Goldilocks” shipping carton. A carton that’s too large allows your items to shift around in transit and potentially incur damage. Choose a container that’s too small, and you risk the product inside experiencing crumple damage.

Amazon and some other retailers use box-on-demand machines and even custom blister packaging in their warehouses to ship items of unusual size or nonstandard shape. These machines are expensive to own, but you can almost certainly find a custom box or carton manufacturer to make them for you in larger quantities or even as one-offs.

If neither of these is a realistic option, concentrate on the variables that are within your control. Err on the side of caution and use a carton that’s slightly too large, rather than too small, and use an appropriate filler to cushion your product and keep it from shifting around.

6. Label Your Products With Handling Instructions

This last recommendation is both your first and last line of defense when it comes to protecting sensitive equipment or bulky and oversized products. It goes beyond slapping a “this side up” label on your products.

Consider this scenario: An order picker in a warehouse reaches a bin location to retrieve a product for shipment, but because the manufacturer didn’t include a label indicating it is intended to be sold as a case pack, the order picker opens the carton to take just one piece. The error will probably be noticed before the product leaves the warehouse, but the packaging for the full case pack is now compromised and will not provide the same degree of stability and protection.

This is just one example of where clear labeling can help prevent product mishandling. It’s bigger than that, too: It proves there’s value in quality communication and prior planning when it comes to establishing guidelines for shipping or receiving products.

Megan Ray Nichols
STEM Writer & Blogger

Resume: schooledbyscience.com/about/

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