Dimensions of your shipping box is an important cost consideration to evaluate when choosing to order wholesale cardboard boxes.
Ideally, you’ll want to order sizes with respect to the pricing guidelines set out by your shipping and distribution partners as typically you’ll find price brackets according to box dimensions. So if most of your products will fit in a box size that’s within a lower price tier, that’s an ideal situation. Of course you’ll need to take into consideration how well the packing, protection, and unboxing experience works for your products and brand, and we have covered this topic in a previous post if that’s your main consideration.
Sometimes however it’s not so easy to order wholesale shipping boxes because your products don’t easily fall into the specific sizing brackets of your partners and your volume isn’t enough to justify buying pallets of boxes at a time and storing all those boxes. This is where some shippers look at cutting down their boxes to size for specific products.
Why We Don’t Recommend Cutting Down Boxes
While reducing your box size manually may seem like your best solution, there are many reasons not to take this DIY approach.
- Saving you any money. When you calculate the labour cost you need to put into cutting your boxes, and the fact that you still need to have a larger box to start with, you may find the savings don’t add up.
- Depending on how many boxes you need to cut down, it may actually be more affordable to call us at Racer Boxes Manufacturing & Printing to see how we can help you get the right sized boxes from the start and save yourself the trouble of “resizing”.
- Warehousing / storage costs. Ordering different sizes doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll use more inventory space. When dealing direct with the shipping box manufacturer, as is the case with us, it may turn out that you do not need to order as many boxes as you think.
- We provide affordable solutions for businesses such as weekly and monthly shipment options that can help lower your warehousing / storage costs compared to ordering a larger shipment all at once.
- Structural integrity. Another important reason we don’t recommend reducing your own boxes is that cuts from a box reducer can introduce points of failure, lowering
Drop tester to simulate shocks to packaged product from material handling during shipment your shipping box’s crush and impact resistance.
- It’s always best to buy the right sizes of boxes for your products –no one involved is going to be happy if your boxes cave in and crush your products while in transit or at a storage facility.
- Branded experience. Cutting down a box with a reducer tool usually looks distinctly DIY. The flaps might end up being extra-long, print and logos might be misplaced or disfigured, folds and joints might show where they shouldn’t or look unnatural.
- If you’re only looking at your bottom line the look of your shipping box might seem trivial however customer retention and marketing can depend heavily on the unboxing experience – especially for ecommerce.
In the end, it’s important to weigh out all of your options when choosing which box sizes to order and whether you may need to cut down your boxes for specific shipments.
We Do Not Use Box Reducers
To be sure, at Racer Boxes, we do not reduce boxes sizes nor cut them down – this is not a service we offer nor recommend. We manufacture cardboard boxes according to strict specifications to ensure a high level of quality and structural integrity.
Related Posts
- Subscription Box Marketing: Custom Die-Cut Mailers
- Competitive Advantages in eCommerce: Custom Mailers 101
- How to Order Wholesale Custom Boxes for Amazon FBA
- Amazon Product Packaging: Custom Printed Box vs Poly Bag
Buy the Box Sizes You Need in Western Canada
We are Racer Boxes Manufacturing & Printing, located in Richmond BC (just south of Vancouver).
If you are in the Greater Vancouver Area, the Okanagan, the Pacific Northwest, or Western Canada, we recommend giving us a call at (604) 270 – 8205 to help you go over your options and decide whether ordering your shipping boxes directly from us makes sense for your business.
Reducing the Cost of Shipping Damages
Reducing the cost of shipping damage is problem for virtually all businesses. For all the hard work that goes into producing your product, it’s all for nothing if the product comes dead on arrival due to a poorly designed shipping box. Even if your products are insured or not fragile, if the box gets to the customer looking like it was kicked through the street, it will affect the first impression of your brand — a critical moment as your customer’s first material experience with your brand usually starts with your shipping box.
How to Reduce Shipping Damages
Clearly printing fragile along with key symbols and instructions is the first step to reduce shipping damages. However often times that alone is not enough. Turns out there is a sociological element to how people shipping your product treat objects according to it’s perceived contents. It makes sense in you are shipping glass, you might print “GLASS” on box. However what if you are shipping something that is clearly not glass?
The technologically advanced bicycle company Vanmoof made international news in September of this year as they were discovered employing a crafty trick to reduce shipping damages of their bikes. The solution they came up with — they printed large TVs on the shipping boxes.
Jason Gay of The Wall Street Journal was the first to catch and report on this smart little trick via Twitter.
Just like that, Shipping Damage to our Bikes Dropped by 70–80%
Bex Rad, VanMoof’s creative director said in a post on Medium that “Your covetable products, your frictionless website, your killer brand — they all count for nothing when your delivery partner drops the ball.”
By changing the shipper’s perception of the product from transporting bikes to flatscreen televisions, VanMoof created a direct reduction in shipping damages: “shipping damage to our bikes dropped by 70-80 percent” said Rad.
Strategic Printing or Deception?
This is certainly a matter of strategy that walks a fine line. It comes down to a little utilitarian calculus: which is better, (a) deceiving your shippers and possibly confusing your customers or (b) reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction? If e-commerce is a large part of your business, the risk of damaged goods may be enough to justify (b), VanMoof’s strategy.
VanMoof is an ecommerce based retailer with plans to sell 90% of their bikes online. So they justify the strategy as follows “anyone in the ecom world knows you’re only as good as your shipping partner. […] Yet no matter who was doing the shipping, too many of our bikes arrived looking like they’d been through a metal-munching combine harvester. It was getting expensive for us, and bloody annoying for our customers.”
So what it came down to in this case was strategic cardboard box printing. Do you think this strategy will this work for you? If so, let us know and we can help!
Vancouver Corrugated Box Printer
If your business is considering custom printed shipping boxes or other ways to reduce shipping damages, Racer Boxes and Printing in Vancouver BC can help. To get started, give us a call at (604) 270 – 8205.
If you’re pleased with the cardboard boxes, products, and services we have provided, please let the world know about it with a G+ review!
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Thank you very much,
The Racer Boxes Team
The cities of Richmond, Delta, Surrey, Pit Meadows, and Maple Ridge have significant land agricultural reserve where fresh produce is grown locally. In Richmond BC alone, where Racer Boxes is located, there is approximately 12,338 acres of land base, or 39% of the City, within the Agricultural Land Reserve. Most of the farm land in Richmond is devoted to producing berries, as shown in the chart to the right.
![ss+(2016-07-19+at+04.35.15)[1]](https://racerboxes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ss-2016-07-19-at-04.35.151.png "Agricultural Production Richmond")
Cranberries make up nearly 40% of Richmond crops and Blueberries make up approximately 25%. With that in mind we want to let our local farmers know that we make and sell wholesale boxes and cartons for fruits and berries, including cranberries and blueberries.
Buying Berry Cartons and Packaging Wholesale
With all those berries there’s a need for berry cartons and packaging, that’s where we come in. There are a lot of advantages of using Racer Boxes for packaging your berries. We’re able to work directly with you to design your boxes according to your specific needs, including providing custom printed labels on your boxes.
We can even arrange weekly deliveries of our cartons to help relieve your storage constraints and in some cases save money compared to buying your berry packaging in bulk.
If you manage a farm in the Greater Vancouver area call Racer Boxes for a free consultation on how we can help improve your cartons and packaging supply chain and help save you money in the process.
Contact Racer Boxes
If you’re looking for agricultural boxes, trays, or cartons, get in touch with Racer Boxes today at (604) 270 – 8205!
The New Horizon of eCommerce for Local Vancouver Farms & Markets
Greater Vancouver has a thriving fresh produce industry, from large chains to innovative boutique shops and folksy farmer’s markets, Vancouverites of all stripes get to enjoy some of the best local produce options available in Canada.
One thing that all retail grocers today have in common is the quickly rising new horizon of eCommerce. It’s a new landscape and new frontier that’s rapidly expanding, based on a growing public awareness and acceptance of online retail services. Like ordering a pizza, super-fast rush deliveries of products of all kinds from tomatoes to cakes to burgers and buns to chocolates are becoming more and more the norm.
No longer limited to ordering from the phone-book or flyers, customers are going online and clicking on same-day deliveries, buying traditional grocery items online and then simply waiting for their groceries to arrive at their door.
We fully expect this trend to accelerate as major players enter the scene along with niche markets of on-demand food products catch on to the trend – such as those in chocolates, home-made foods, snacks, and so on.
Even the traditional farmers market produce isn’t immune to the trend, there is a rising demand ordering-online fresh produce for everything from cucumbers and potatoes to cilantro and kale.
The Rise of One-Hour Produce Deliveries
Companies like Amazon are leading the charge here with services like Amazon Prime Now, which currently offers free 1-hour food delivery for select cities featuring a wide range of food and products from local brand name restaurants and grocery stores. Even fresh baked organic pastries are available, including free 2-hour deliveries from New Seasons Market Organic Bakery in Portland Oregon.
Even in Vancouver Canada, to-your-door deliveries are quickly becoming part of our everyday marketplace. Even without the aid of Amazon, major grocery chains such as Wholefoods are now offering 1 hour deliveries in Vancouver BC. Finally, you can order your organic kale and other produce at 5:00pm and have it arrive in time for your regular 6:00pm dinner preparations. Pretty amazing.
After dinner, one can even pick up the phone and order fresh-baked cookies for a nice treat — just check out Cookies Of Course for a local Vancouver example.
Florists are another niche example who have actually a head start in this domain selling flowers online and are now moving into new markets while they have the lead. One such Vancouver florist is now offering same day birthday cakes, cupcakes, and cookies directly — check out Flowers on 1st for that example.
How We Can Help
With same-day delivery of produce and groceries becoming a new reality, the new domain of eCommerce offers opportunities for traditional retail stores like farmers, fresh produce markets, and others to free themselves of the narrow constraints of retail locations and outlets.
Having the ideal store front location or outlet isn’t the only real estate opportunity that matters anymore (which is great considering the real-estate market in Vancouver these days).
The question is how you take your farm or store-front onto the internet and who you partner with. Finding a reliable, high quality, and affordable fruits and produce box supplier is a critical part of your supply chain concerns — which is where our team at RacerBoxes comes in.
We service customers across Western Canada; and, unlike the various types of box distributors, we make all of the boxes we sell in our Richmond BC box manufacturing and printing facility. There is no middle man. This allows us to set more affordable prices and provide better customer service without cutting any corners. We offer affordable prices on wholesale produce boxes, allowing you to design the right look and quality of box according to your branding and business needs.
In fact, working with us means you are able to specify your own grocery delivery box design directly with our team — from designing the die-cut folding patterns, to the cardboard colour, weight, strength and texture, you get amazing service throughout. And we ship your custom boxes directly to you from our facility. We even offer weekly and monthly delivery options to better meet your needs and storage constraints!
Related eCommerce Topics
In the following series of posts we will look at other key eCommerce marketplaces and important marketing strategies behind using custom mailers and custom shipping boxes within those areas. Our featured topics include:
- Competitive Advantages in eCommerce: Custom Mailers 101
- How to Order Wholesale Custom Boxes for Amazon FBA
- Amazon Product Packaging: Custom Printed Box vs Poly Bag
- Understanding the Subscription Box Marketing Strategy
Ordering from Racer Boxes in Vancouver, B.C.
Racer Printing and Box Manufacturing manufactures and sells all of our boxes locally in-house, in Richmond B.C., Canada. We lead by making your orders affordable and flexible. Get exactly the right kind of shipping boxes you need, along with custom printing, tailored for your business.
To learn more about ordering custom shipping boxes and our box printing services, contact us today at (604) 270 – 8205!
Die-Cut Box Sales & Deliveries to Alberta & Western Canada
Folks around Edmonton and Calgary may not have heard of Racer Printing and Box Manufacturing as we get the bulk of our orders from within B.C., but we want to reach out to the Prairies because we’re not just a Vancouver B.C company, we’re a Western Canada cardboard box manufacturer, servicing our neighbors across western Canada.
That’s right, we’re proud to be selling and shipping our high quality, affordably priced wholesale cardboard boxes across Western Canada to our friends in Alberta.
So if you’re in Alberta and need die-cut cardboard boxes shipped directly to you wholesale, just give your Racer Boxes a call.
Our Cardboard Box Services with Shipping to Alberta
From custom corrugated cardboard boxes to plain old stock cartons, we make them and sell them directly from our plant in Richmond BC. Some of our key products include:
| Stock Cartons | Custom Boxes | Box Printing |
| Small Die Cut Boxes | Food Boxes | Produce Boxes |
| Delivery Boxes | Bakers Boxes | Agricultural Boxes |
| Small Die Cut Mailers | ||
Why Choose Racer Boxes
Racer Boxes is a proud Western Canadian company and an industry leader in our quality of service and flexibility. We produce the among highest quality cardboard boxes as well as box printing services. And we have die cut custom options for many needs.
Contact Racer Boxes in Western Canada
Whether you’re in British Columbia or in Alberta, get in touch with us today at Racer Boxes Cardboard Boxes Manufacturer to see how we can help you and your business get ahead.
Contact us today at (604) 270 – 8205 for your wholesale cardboard box sales and services in B.C, Alberta, and across Western Canada!
The SubCom Model, Old & New
We sell a lot of wholesale custom mailers to businesses across the Vancouver lower-mainland, so the subscription model isn’t new to us. And for those of us old enough to remember Columbia House Record Club, the subscription business model doesn’t seem like a new model or a new innovation. But it actually has become a new phenomenon — known as “sub-com.” The term subcom comes from the pairing of the subscription model with eCommerce and this paring has transformed the subscription model into an disruptive marketing strategy that’s shaking up the retail space.
Take BarkBox for instance. Their subscribers grew from 1,500 to 55,000 in just one year with over 95% retention. While 55,000 may not sound huge in total numbers, one has to consider that most customers are loyal monthly customers signing up for 6-12 months of service. That gives a startup a lot of financial stability! For big numbers, take Birchbox, which gained over a million subscribers within its first five years! It’s that kind of growth that can only happen by leveraging the power of modern day eCommerce technology.
How to start in SubCom, Designing Custom Die-Cut Mailers
ECommerce technology has made the subscription model an extremely easy space to get into. Canadian consumers are already online and shopping; and with streamlined online services such as Cratejoy, it’s easier than ever to get up and running in the SubCom space.
What makes the SubCom model standout in our view is it’s embedded marketing strategy, you can’t separate the product from the marketing and branding. Even if your box is packed with other branded products (which is common), it creates a gestalt — where the sum of the whole is greater than its parts. This means that when your customers receive your box, all of the products in the box are part of your product. The parts included are psychologically wrapped up as a part of your brand.
Branded Packaging
The Gestalt effect is what makes creating a branded packaging experience such an important part of the subscription box marketing strategy. When it comes to ordering custom mailers and boxes for your SubCom, everything from the outside to the inside of your mailer needs to be thought out and customized. Not unlike gift-wrapping, the idea behind creating a branded packaging experience is to make the subscription box itself part of the experience — part of the product. But unlike gift-wrapping, even the inside of your box is an important part of the branding strategy.
How the Box Unfolds
When ordering custom die cut mailers, you should consider exactly how you want your customer to unbox and experience your packaging. Which ways should the box unfold? Do you have something printed on the inside flap? How many steps are involved in the unboxing?
Racer Boxes, Custom Mailers in Vancouver
If you are looking for custom mailers for use as subscription boxes, give us a call at Racer Boxes in Vancouver BC at (604) 270 – 8205 . We manufacture die-cut mailers and sell wholesale from Richmond BC and across the greater Vancouver area.
Related Posts
Let’s assume your products come to you pre-packaged in poly-bags from the manufacture, and let’s further assume Amazon always re-boxes your items in Amazon’s own shipping boxes. Is it worth it for you to use your own custom printed branded box? That’s the question we are going to tackle here — using custom printed boxes vs poly bag — and our questions revolve around the effectiveness of branding and marketing on shipping bags vs shipping boxes. Is any of it worth the expense and why?
This is a question that comes up from time to time and budding e-commerce sellers along some of the more seasoned business veterans. It can be difficult to track and evaluate marketing expenses especially when it comes to printed materials. While in-house A-B testing can help us evaluate marketing strategies, testing one’s branding is a different story. Branding involves a much larger process of interrelated parts — from where your products are made, to customer service, to packaging, to your products themselves, it all comes together to form your brand.
In the end this is a question of whether creating a “branded packaging experience” and is worth the effort and expense. This is a question we’ve looked at in some detail in previous posts and we think there’s a very strong case for creating a “branded experience.” In our last post we covered the question: Why Market to Existing Customers, which includes statistics and studies published in the Harvard Business Review (that’s a post worth reading if you’re looking hard at the value using of custom boxes, strictly in terms of return on investment).
In the last post we looked at metrics such as customer retention where “increasing customer retention by 5% increased profits by 25% to 95%.” In this post we are going to look at how branding your shipping boxes can affect your digital marketing strategy.
How can my shipping boxes affect my digital strategy?
The relationship between the cardboard box and the internet becomes more clear when you consider that for most Amazon sellers, customers will only directly experience your physical presence through your shipping boxes and your products. They won’t see your store, they won’t meet any sales staff. Their first impression of you is either going to be from plastic bag a corrugated cardboard box.
Let’s consider Amazon the process of Amazon reviews for instance. Amazon frequently asks customers to rate their experience with sellers; let’s say a customer gains confidence in your business through a seamless shipping and packaging experience and enjoys your product as well. When they are rating you as the seller, they might not think of your box in particular, but it will mostly likely influence their perception of you.
Brand Strategy & The Edge of Chaos
While the difference between plastic or cardboard may seem trivial, it’s important to remember that when it comes to complex systems like a company’s brand or identity, the smallest changes can have large, far-reaching consequences. For example, something as simple as the colour of your box and print can have a dramatic unintended influence; let’s say it matches the colours of a popular political party in your customer’s country, or it’s a lucky colour in their culture, or something else that you may have never considered. The idea here is using symbolic references and associations to help your brand form a positive feedback loop. Sometimes it only takes a few good reviews in the right place and time for a brand strategy to emerge and become self-reinforcing.
One Sure Thing
This is why the branded packaging experience even for cardboard shipping boxes is so important: it’s one of the only marketing tools in your kit that you know for sure will be directly in your customer’s hands. While a plastic poly bag may be cheaper at the outset, the cost of poly vs custom printed boxes has to be weighed in respect to your overall marketing strategy.
Buying Wholesale Shipping Boxes Direct
If you are considering getting custom printed shipping boxes for your eCommerce business, it often helps to find a wholesale box manufacture that’s in your region and buy direct. If you have any questions on pricing and which services we can provide your business, give Racer Boxes in Vancouver B.C. a call at (604) 270 – 8205 .
This series of posts for small businesses in Vancouver BC, our Box Manufacturing company in Richmond BC provides responses on important questions for startups and small businesses in eCommerce that rely on shipping boxes or wholesale cardboard mailers in one form or another.
This post concerns the types of boxes and the boxes sizes that are recommended to send to Fulfillment by Amazon and how to get the best bang-for-your-buck, cost wise. If you haven’t been following our eCommerce series so far, you may want to also check out our previous posts: Printing your own Label Stickers vs Custom Printed Boxes, 3 Tips to Boost Efficiency for Vancouver eCommerce, and Buying Wholesale Boxes: China vs Vancouver Canada.
Tips for Amazon’s FBA
Use Double or Triple Walled Corrugated Cardboard
Amazon sellers will often recommended against using single walled boxes, in order to ensure your products get to Amazon’s Fulfillment Centres (FCs) safely. As one Amazon seller states in the Amazon seller forums: “I highly recommend that whatever box size you use, make sure they are double walled or triple walled, as that will help protect the contents inside and the box will show up to the FCs in much better shape than a single-walled box will.”
Also, another reason to go with double walled corrugated cardboard or more is that you can’t rely on Amazon to double box and safely package your items. While Amazon typically does re-box (or double-box) items at their FCs, they don’t always do so. So it’s necessary to ensure your products are protected in the event they ship from the FC with nothing more than the packing you’ve provided.
Buying Wholesale Boxes from the Manufacturer
If you’re an Amazon seller looking to use the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service, you can save a great deal on ordering custom wholesale shipping boxes directly from the box manufacturer. Box manufactures, like Racer Boxes in Vancouver BC, are able to make your boxes to order, providing custom dimensions, die-cut designs, in-house box printing services, along with industry leading customer service.
Min-Max the Box Size
It’s a balancing act to stay within Amazon’s box size pricing structure and allow enough room to fit various sized items. An advantage of ordering directly from the box manufacture is that it allows you optimize your boxes sizes in accordance with FBA box dimension requirements. As a wholesale box manufacture, we can provide the flexibility you need to meet your sizing, branding, and protection needs.
Vancouver Wholesale Custom Mailers & Box Printing
Get the perfect eCommerce shipping boxes from Racer Printing and Box Manufacturing. We manufacture and sell custom mailers and shipping boxes in Richmond B.C., Canada. And we also now provide wholesale shipping supplies for the Vancouver Area, allowing you to streamline your ordering process.
Give Racer Boxes a call today at (604) 270 – 8205 to get your high quality custom shipping boxes with custom box printing.
The Resurgence of Mailers
Remember when Netflix used to mail DVDs in its iconic red envelops? Guess what, that business model is still alive and well. Netflix currently has 33 physical distribution centres that process around 3,400 discs per hour!
While physical retail store fronts have lost ground, mailers are doing well and growing in leaps and bounds. As such, in the following post, we’ll look at how custom mailers make good business sense in terms of marketing, ROI, and in light of disruptive industries in e-commerce.
Leveraging Disruptive Business Models
By leveraging new technologies and services, such as automated checkout and shipping services, startups and small businesses can gain a strong competitive advantage over traditional retail stores.
Take DollarShaveClub.com as a recent example. With a disruptive marketing campaign and an even more disruptive business model, known as the “subscription box model” or “subcom”, the dollar shave club has grown from a tiny startup to boast “hundreds of thousands” of monthly subscribers.
The subcom industry is highly disruptive and an exciting way to break into established markets and competition against the big-boys in the retail space. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We will delve deeper into this subject in our upcoming post: “Understanding the Subscription Box Marketing Strategy”
Gaining The Competitive Advantage: Custom Mailers
Custom mailers (or small die-cut shipping boxes) are of big importance in the disruptive ecommerce industry. Netflix uses iconic red mailers and Amazon uses a friendly arrow that looks like smiley face. In both cases, when you see their custom printed boxes, your decision to use their service is instantly reinforced.
But Why Market to Existing Customers?
Some business owners may wonder why they should bother custom printing their shipping boxes. “These boxes go to our customers; i.e., our marketing has already worked on them! So why bother?” In a word: retention.
In a study published by the Harvard Business Review, the researchers show that for traditional businesses in most industries, “increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.” This is due to the incredibly low return on investment for new customer acquisition.
The study then followed this trend in a marketing study on ecommerce and found the value of retention is even more pronounced. In fact, “web customers tend to consolidate their purchases with one primary supplier, to the extent that purchasing from the supplier’s site becomes part of their daily routine.”
For any e-commerce business, the researchers make it clear: “you cannot generate superior long-term profits unless you achieve superior customer loyalty.”
This is Where Custom Mailers Earn Their Stripes
A branded packaging experience requires a thoughtful selection of your packaging and shipping materials, as well as the deliberate presentation of your products. Its purpose is to provide value for your customer as well as your business by creating a memorable experience.
Whatever your branded packaging experience is, the upshot of shipping custom printed boxes to your existing customers is the return on investment provided by customer retention and brand loyalty.
Vancouver Wholesale Custom Mailers & Box Printing
For your custom mailers in the Vancouver area, consider the savings and benefits of ordering from local box manufacturer! Racer Printing and Box Manufacturing makes custom mailers and shipping boxes locally in-house in Richmond B.C., Canada.
Craft the perfect branded packaging experience, give Racer Boxes a call today at (604) 270 – 8205 to get your high quality custom shipping boxes with custom box printing.