Ideas for Cost Savings in E-Commerce Warehouses

Jay Moris has an excellent article in this month’s Inbound Logistics on ways you can cut expenses in your e-commerce operation. Some quick pointers:

• Increase customer satisfaction. Moris explains that right-sizing your packages can reduce carton size and ensure customers receive the right package at the right time.
• Reduce packaging costs. By using cartonization strategies, you can reduce parcel sizes – and by extension, shipping and packaging costs.
• Decrease labor and increase throughput. By optimizing its sortation systems, one retailer cut 62 cents off every package shipped.
• Reduce freight, sortation, and shipping costs. Reducing carton dimensions does all of these things in a world where just a single sheet of paper is capable of changing a carton’s shipping class.

We live in a world where weight and dimensional measurement of packages is becoming faster and easier to gauge. Shippers can and will be able to charge more for smaller and smaller differences, so every bit of the process you can automate and optimize, the better. There are more tips (and plenty more detail) at the article – check it out.

Scott Stone is Cisco-Eagle's Advertising and E-business Manager. He is a 20-year veteran of the material handling industry. He publishes the award-winning Material Handling Tips & Information Newsletter and works on all aspects of the company's communications efforts. See Cisco-Eagle on Twitter