How to create the perfect ecommerce packaging

The seem­ing­ly unstop­pable rise of online shop­ping was firm­ly estab­lished long before the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic left high streets emp­ty. Of course, ease, price and vast choice are behind its suc­cess, but this year, with con­sumers con­fined to their homes, online shop­ping is also dri­ven by neces­si­ty. 

This is no doubt wel­come news for online retail­ers. But these busi­ness­es must now meet a triple chal­lenge when pack­ag­ing and send­ing out goods: deal­ing with spikes in order vol­umes; prov­ing their sus­tain­abil­i­ty cre­den­tials; and, in the face of these pres­sures, pro­vid­ing the enjoy­able unbox­ing expe­ri­ence that con­sumers increas­ing­ly expect.

Reducing ecommerce packaging good for consumers

Stuff­ing card­board box­es, plas­tic mail­ing bags and all man­ner of foam and bub­ble wrap into recy­cling bins is an every­day chore for stay-at-home con­sumers. For online retail­ers, fit­ting more prod­uct into less, and more eco-friend­ly, pack­ag­ing is there­fore a way to save costs, boost cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and stand out from oth­er brands.

Inno­v­a­tive ecom­merce pack­ag­ing solu­tions are emerg­ing in direct response to the pan­dem­ic. For exam­ple, the clo­sure of pubs and restau­rants dur­ing lock­down saw alco­hol con­sump­tion become a strict­ly at-home activ­i­ty; cue the launch of wines, cock­tails and spir­its in slim, recy­cled plas­tic bot­tles, which can slip eas­i­ly through a let­ter­box.

What would have been regard­ed as a nov­el­ty prod­uct last year now looks like a space and resource-sav­ing inno­va­tion. Cou­pled with a strong focus on attrac­tive brand­ing, major gift online retail­ers, includ­ing let­ter­box flower sell­ers Bloom & Wild and gift com­pa­ny Not On The High Street, quick­ly made deals with these drinks brands to incor­po­rate let­ter­box-friend­ly booze into their own offer. It’s an exam­ple of how rel­e­vant, time­ly pack­ag­ing can make the dif­fer­ence between a new brand’s suc­cess or fail­ure.  

Getting packaging right, when the shopper isn’t looking

How­ev­er, mak­ing ecom­merce pack­ag­ing meet the demands of 2020 and beyond also requires invest­ment in pack­ag­ing that the cus­tomer is unlike­ly to see. Major ecom­merce plat­forms such as Ama­zon, for exam­ple, typ­i­cal­ly require busi­ness­es to pro­vide prod­ucts ful­ly sealed in pro­tec­tive wrap­ping. This is to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, spoil­ing or tam­per­ing while they sit in ful­fil­ment ware­hous­es or depots. Indi­vid­ual poly­bags – clear bags usu­al­ly made from vir­gin plas­tic – are used to meet this require­ment.

Yet fail­ing to use eco-friend­ly pack­ag­ing through­out your business’s entire sup­ply chain tar­nish­es a brand’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty cre­den­tials and risks accu­sa­tions of green­wash­ing if con­sumers find out.

Along­side its biodegrad­able cus­tomer-fac­ing pack­ag­ing, ecom­merce brand OneNine5, which sells reusable trav­el acces­sories, this year switched to also using water-sol­u­ble poly­bags to store stock.

The irony, how­ev­er, is that after years of efforts to reduce plas­tic use, and with strong pub­lic aware­ness of sin­gle-use plastic’s envi­ron­men­tal impact, per­cep­tions of the mate­r­i­al may be shift­ing as a result of COVID-19.

“Peo­ple are prob­a­bly more accept­ing of plas­tic this year,” says OneNine5’s co-founder Alex Stew­art. “Plas­tic pack­ag­ing, in many cas­es, is seen as a neg­a­tive, but there are still also con­no­ta­tions of it keep­ing things ster­ile. In a pan­dem­ic, peo­ple are see­ing plas­tic as keep­ing things clean­er. In that respect, it does give peace of mind.”

How to create high-quality customer experience

So, brands need to make sure they have their sus­tain­abil­i­ty and hygiene bases cov­ered. In addi­tion, for non-essen­tial pur­chas­es, many con­sumers still expect an enjoy­able expe­ri­ence when receiv­ing, open­ing and unwrap­ping their parcels: the unbox­ing ele­ment online retail­ers must main­tain, and even height­en, to win busi­ness in a com­pet­i­tive online mar­ket.

The Lit­tle Loop, an online busi­ness which pro­vides children’s cloth­ing for rent, sends out the cloth­ing in seal­able, flex­i­ble PVC pouch­es, instead of card­board box­es or sin­gle-use plas­tic pack­ag­ing. The cus­tomer sends the clothes back in the pouch when the rental peri­od is up. The bags, which are more com­mon­ly used by the gov­ern­ment as diplo­mat­ic bags for send­ing offi­cial doc­u­ments and items, are guar­an­teed to with­stand being post­ed 2,000 times.

Founder Char­lotte Mor­ley says that while uncon­ven­tion­al, the bags are nev­er­the­less durable, flex­i­ble and secure ways to send items and don’t require foam or void fill­ing. “Our con­sumers keep the cloth­ing for three months on aver­age. We’re poten­tial­ly only send­ing these bags out four times a year, which means fea­si­bly our busi­ness could use them for 20 years,” she says. 

Mor­ley adds that tran­si­tion­ing from the tra­di­tion­al ecom­merce card­board box or enve­lope brings com­pro­mis­es. “I can’t just get rid of that unbox­ing expe­ri­ence alto­geth­er; it is such a key part of brand­ing,” she says. “One of the chal­lenges is that the unbox­ing expe­ri­ence only real­ly works if the cus­tomer can open up a box or a lid and it’s all laid out per­fect­ly. Because our pack­ag­ing is soft bags, things do get jos­tled around inside them.”

The secret to great ecommerce packaging

Brands that choose nov­el or sus­tain­able pack­ag­ing meth­ods must there­fore find oth­er ways to cre­ate a plea­sur­able unbox­ing expe­ri­ence. Mor­ley adds: “You have to meet a cer­tain lev­el of con­sumer expec­ta­tion. We don’t want to com­plete­ly den­i­grate the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, even though we’re a sus­tain­able com­pa­ny. So we wrap the cloth­ing using sus­tain­ably print­ed, recy­cled tis­sue paper and use stick­ers made with veg­etable-based inks instead.”

We wrap the cloth­ing using sus­tain­ably print­ed, recy­cled tis­sue paper and use stick­ers made with veg­etable-based inks

Hon­ing a unique, sus­tain­able ecom­merce pack­ag­ing strat­e­gy costs time, mon­ey and effort. But brands chart­ing their own path are more like­ly to make returns from their pack­ag­ing than those that mere­ly do what is expect­ed of them, says Luc Speiss­er, chief inno­va­tion offi­cer at glob­al brand con­sul­tant Lan­dor. His advice for brands is: “You need to do good to be rel­e­vant, but do good in your own dif­fer­ent and unique way. That’s how it becomes a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage, not just a cost or a race to com­pli­ance.”

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