Despite the gross volume of products your factory produces in a month, you may still be unable to expand your factory to include a packaging and shipping department. You should not feel bad about that, since there are hundreds of factories that are in the same boat. In fact, offsite shipping and packaging is quite common. Here are your options and why they may work for your needs.
Ship to Packager, Ship Back to Factory
You can ship all of your products to a custom packaging plant where they will make the perfect boxes to fit your products. They can also package your items for shipping, if you ship multiple items in the same box to retail outlets. Once the custom packaging company has completed your order, they can ship the items back to your factory, where everything in its packaging can sit until consumer or retail orders start coming in.
Ship to Packager, Forward to Shipper
You can also ship all of your products to the packager, who then forwards the packaged goods onto custom shipping companies. You pay for all of the packaging and shipping, as estimated by the packager, and the packager does the rest. This may be the right option for you if you cannot store all of your packaged products in an onsite warehouse or your factory simply does not have the room to store anything at all.
Packager Is Both the Box Creator and the Shipper
There are packaging companies that are both box creators and shipping companies. This is especially convenient for factory owners like yourself because then you just have to ship your products once to one location. The packager/shipper handles all of the rest of the details.
Packager Creates Simple Boxes, You Pack on a Smaller Scale
Packaging companies that create simple solutions for complex situations are able to create packaging that fits production line needs. Even though you do not have enough space in your factory to package goods in a separate area, the packaging company can create boxes that allow employees at the end of every line to package goods anyway. As the goods come to the end of the assembly line, the employees box each item and drop it into a prepaid, pre-addressed box.
When these boxes are full, the employee uses a roll of packing tape to seal the box and then places the box on a pallet behind him/her. Truckloads of these pallets go out daily so that your factory's production is not constrained by available space. It is a packaging line on a much smaller scale within your own factory, and an option which does work for a lot of manufacturers.
Why These Options May Work for You and Your Factory
A couple of these options, such as shipping to a packager and shipping back to your factory, may work for you if you want to have more control over the actual shipping process and less control over the packaging. By paying for shipping from your own factory, you are able to control the associated costs, which means you can spend more on custom packaging.
The other options, such as the packager acts as both box creator and shipper and the packager forwards boxed goods to the shipper, are more of a business convenience. You are often charged a flat rate based on the custom box, shipping box, and standard shipping price by weight per shipping box. You may also be offered a volume discount, which would decrease your packaging and shipping expenses if you meet the set volume threshold for packaging and shipping goods.
Share6 November 2017
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