Sector Spotlight: E-commerce Packaging Made E-asy!

In the wake of a hectic ‘Black Friday’ weekend, followed by a chaotic ‘Cyber Monday’, it has never been more evident that e-commerce is the retail industry’s greatest ally in the pursuit of growing sales.

In today’s digital era, e-commerce is big business and is still growing. Either get online or get out! It’s easy to see why too – filling your shopping cart with the click of a few buttons, warm and dry on your sofa whilst shielded from over-zealous store-goers with their jostling and grabbing – it’s the height of convenience! Online shopping is becoming more and more tempting year on year, especially in the season of festive splurging. News coverage over Black Friday 2017 showed the doors of major high street retailers fly open with grandiose fanfare, to reveal only a sheepish-looking handful of bargain-hunters waiting outside, the more shrewd customers already surfing their sites.

The stores are winners by embracing the shift to online shopping too; no tidying and reorganising after a whirlwind crowd of customers, zero hours spent dressing window displays, no teenage store assistants with false smiles to generate complaints and the power to do business entirely unrestrained by Sunday trading laws or traditional store opening hours.

The warehouse workers though, inevitably, feel the squeeze. ‘The Independent’ headline announced on Cyber Monday 2017 that ‘Amazon workers working 55-hour weeks and so exhausted by targets are falling asleep standing up – Ambulance crews called after workers collapse at work’. Clearly, more sales online means more pressure behind the scenes. This is where the right packaging and/or labelling equipment comes into its own – but it must be chosen wisely. Choosing the wrong machinery for the warehouse and logistics processes will cost online retailers dear. The machinery breaks down or runs too slowly and customers get angry waiting for their deliveries. The machinery doesn’t put the right labels on the right packages and your carrier network is in crisis. The machinery fails to seal the goods in a watertight package and you will have to process a high level of returns, leaving your workforce even further fatigued!

Yorkshire Packaging Systems have the answers to this industry’s problems. Firstly, we are the UK’s leading supplier of shrink wrapping equipment. Traditionally, you imagine your online purchases almost always being shipped out in cardboard boxes, cartons or parcels. We would encourage you to re-imagine your packaging operation with shrink wrapping instead, the benefits of which are numerous. Significant cost savings can be made on the materials, in the range of 50-75%, efficiency is improved because products can be automatically collated, and warehouse space is saved as one pallet of shrink film is equivalent to 15 pallets of cardboard.

Furthermore, Yorkshire Packaging Systems are the exclusive UK distributors of high-end Hugo Beck shrink wrapping, automation and labelling machinery, which could offer the perfect solution to any e-commerce conundrum! With German engineering, the machines in this range can boast impressive speeds of up to 130 packs per minute for those demanding warehouse environments with huge amounts of orders to fulfil and can be supplied with feeders, labelling and mailing applicators and conveyors for a full warehouse dream team.

YPS also offer a wide array of transit packaging sleeve sealers and different specifications of polythene shrink films to ensure your customer’s goods reach them in pristine condition, even in wet environments where a cardboard box wouldn’t cut it, or after a bumpy journey where a box wouldn’t offer the same protection. Alternatively, if your product needs to land on those doormats with glossy, display-style packaging, we have a range of machinery and high clarity polyolefin shrink films to optimise their appearance and in turn, your customer’s satisfaction.

No good online retailer would invest in equipment for their warehouse without the reassurance of premium backup and support to keep their operation running smoothly. The internet never sleeps and so the big players in the industry cannot afford to either. The inclusive service contracts offered with the sale of every machine, the dedicated team of service engineers, the warehouse stocked with film and the supply of spare parts on the shelf at our UK premises will keep your operation going for as long as your sales do. Trust us, we’ve won industry awards for this stuff!

Shrink wrapping solutions from Yorkshire Packaging means no more collapsing factory workers!