As an online retailer, you want to offer your customers the best possible shipping experience. This includes offering in-cart shipping rates that meet customer expectations while avoiding spending more on shipping than necessary. 

A sometimes overlooked but significant factor that impacts shipping rates is how items are packed. To get the best shipping rates, it’s important to pack items into the boxes that best fit those items. If you’re not packing efficiently, you could be losing money with every order you ship.

Today, are you losing money because of the difference between the in-cart shipping costs you charge customers and the actual shipping costs that carriers charge you because of inefficient packing and not leveraging a packing optimization solution?

Save Money with Smart Packing and Dynamic Rules

ShipHawk’s Smart Packing™ is an intelligent algorithm that automates box selection by identifying the best way to pack an order based on item characteristics such as dimensions and weight. With Smart Packing™, you can reduce manual work and inefficient decision-making while minimizing shipping costs and reducing packaging waste. 

Working with Smart Packing™ is ShipHawk’s powerful dynamic rules engine.  One way you can use the dynamic rules engine is to have specific rules about which items go into which types and sizes of boxes, poly bags, or packages.

Smart Packing™

With Smart Packing™, you can quickly and accurately find the best way to pack items into boxes. Further, as needed for larger orders, you can then immediately identify the best way to pack those boxes onto pallets.  Smart Packing™ can greatly improve your packing efficiency, and is especially ideal for packing scenarios where you have:

• A  variety of items (SKUs) with various dimensions and weights
• Items whose dimensions can fit well into rectangular, box-shaped packages
• A variety of differently-sized containers to choose from when packing
• Modifiable containers such as telescoping boxes or cut-to-size boxes
• Some items that can be neatly rolled, folded, or stacked
• Orders that can include a high number of items
• Orders that can include a variety of different items

To learn more about the full range of capabilities and how Smart Packing™ can benefit your business, Packing Optimization.

Dynamic Rules Engine

With the dynamic rules engine, you can define rules to manage all kinds of packing situations specific to your business. For example, when packing, do you need to:

• Use only certain types of containers for specific shipping carriers
• Use only specific,  unique containers for particular items/products/SKUs, because of value, fragility, or unusual shape/dimensions
• Consider the National Motor Freight Classification Code (NMFC) of the package
• Consider the Harmonized System (HS) code of the package
• Consider which warehouse the item is coming from
• Consider the destination country
• Consider whether the order is being fulfilled for Amazon Prime

…and many more. You can manage many more such situations with the dynamic rules engine, which offers over sixty criteria for defining shipping policy rules.  To learn more about how the Dynamic Rules Engine™ can meet your packing use cases and business requirements, see Dynamic Shipping Rules. 

Learn More

Together, Smart Packing™ and the dynamic rules engine can assure that you are packing every order as efficiently as possible. To learn more about how ShipHawk can make sure you are not losing money during your packing process, contact us today.