The retail market is a vast and complicated conglomerate of products and procedures that come together to create a business.  The thousands if not millions of things that have to come together for a single company to even sell a pencil is rather amazing.  Now imagine a new company selling thousands of items and need millions of things to go right every single day in order for them to be successful.  It is a profound and powerful thoughts and is one of the great marvels of modern society.  Today companies can start from nothing and begin the complicated process of being successful and have lots of options and opportunities in order to do it.  So I want to go over some of my favorite things that have allowed my shipping department to get the best shipping supplies for the job.

Trial and error.  This is one of the most important parts of the shipping process.  Lots of things can go wrong.  The wrong products can be sent or the worst retail error of all.  The security tags are still on products that were sent to a customer with no way of removing them.  So having processes in place to take care of this takes time and effort. 

It also usually takes mistakes.  So give yourself some room for error. Bad things will happen and you will have to deal with them. Plan ahead and prepare to also be able to replace things that go wrong.  So if for some reason you are using boxes instead of bags for your shipping supplies be prepared to switch them.  Sometimes it is better to use one medium over another and the reasons can be endless. 

Cost can be a big reason for making changes to items.  If you find out that shipping cost 4 dollars less to use a bag than a box then that is something to keep in mind.  But what if a bag is a dollar more per item than a box? Well there is still a three dollar difference between the two.  But then take into account the damage rate of products.  Have some arrived damaged in a bag vs a box and if so how many.  How much was the damage wand was that enough to offset the 3 dollar difference each time you ship an item out.  These calculations are very important and must be thought through in order to understand the actual cost and best supplies to get.