SMB eCommerce May Keep Up in Made-to-Ship Trend – With Modernization

It isn’t often that cost-cutting for businesses can coincide with environmental benefits. However, that is the case in the newest innovation in shipping: made-to-measure cardboard boxes. As reported earlier this month by WSJ, the days of shipping boxes mismatched in size to the item it carries may be coming to an end. Made-to-measure cardboard boxes sized for the outgoing package can now be custom cut within a distribution center. This reduces what can be massive levels of cardboard waste and shipping costs that come as eCommerce demand continues to rise. The ability to create these boxes, once limited to mega-merchants such as Walmart and Amazon, is now being made available to a wider retailer audience as costs come down and production is being driven to scale.

The speed of these machines — now able to keep up with the pace of fulfillment, allowing companies to continue their operational pace while cutting shipping costs — is appealing. However, for retailers trying to appeal to an environmentally conscious consumer segment, the benefits seem almost too good to be true.

Fortunately, they’re not. Access to custom-cut cardboard shipping boxes may provide the same cost savings as the largest sector players – with some systems modernization. This preparation may be a near-necessity in order to be sector-competitive and benefit from savings that could more than make up for the cost of modernization. After all, with the massive numbers of orders these outsourced custom-cut companies are receiving, there may be little time to handle orders not part of a modernized platform. The retail sector is catching on to automation’s benefits, as demonstrated in the PYMNTS collaboration with Corcentric, “Digital Payments: Modernizing Procurement Processes.”

Across industries, the top answer to why companies are investing in procurement was far and away to modernize processes. This modernization upgrade is part of a larger ripple effect of back-office investments, made in conjunction with other efforts on the part of businesses to improve their supply chain interactions. This may be due to the realization that modernized procurement and other related systems are all but necessary to implement in order to survive in the ultra-competitive eCommerce landscape.

As shipping costs continue to drop, eCommerce retailers may have the opportunity to further save on logistics in the long term by modernizing their processes today.