Your shipping process should run like a well oiled machine. I have an engineering background so I like to think of the whole process with the same things I learned whilst studying mechanical engineering. The KEY thing to know about any fulfillment system is iterative refinement.
Iterative refinement means making something better in versions, or iterations. So first you need to make a process exist, even if it’s not that good, then you need to make it better. Maybe by iteration 10 or 100, it will be very close to perfect… but warehouse systems don’t need to exist in a state of perfection. You can always make an imperfect system a little bit better (just take caution not to OVER-engineer your systems, it can be a big waste of time).
Transparently, with this document my goal is to teach you how to run your own fulfillment until it is financially viable for you to come on as a client with me. At the end of the day Logistics sucks and as a brand owner, you should be focusing on SELLING YOUR PRODUCT not shipping it. Lots of brand owners will tell me “well I really take pride in doing my shipping” and in reality they are just doing shipping because it’s easier than growing the company. It’s a form of pain avoidance and you know it!
If you want to make a shit ton of money, you gotta outsource the robot tasks. This is how I make over $300,000 per month at 24. It’s because I know when to have someone else do shit for me.
THAT BEING SAID… I will drop all the sauce in this document, this is going to be the best rundown on how to get from 1 order per day to 1000 orders per day from a logistics perspective. I’m not holding back anything if you reallllyy do want to fulfill for yourself but if that’s the case just know you are actively losing money by not outsourcing this shit.
When FulfillmentMAX started, we printed our labels on a 4x6 sheet and the packing slips on a sheet of printer paper, then we would rip all the labels and organize the slips manually… This caused a lot of times where we would mis-sort 1 page and cause a 15 minute long emergency of re-organizing the pages…
We were ignorant to the fact that you could literally print packing slips and labels 1 after the other from shopify and it saves about 4 hours per day and decreases mistakes by around 15%
Here’s a video on how to fix it!
The most important document I’ve made here is the Master Sheet, I’ll explain it and give you a link to download below. Add this to your P&L or use it separately each day after printing
Picking your packages is one of the most important parts of this job, there a few things you need to know regarding this so you’re shipping as cost effectively as possible and your items aren’t getting damaged in the mail.
Key things to note is that I said “cost effectively” not “cheaply” - Cheap is never fucking cheap in this industry. You can get cheaper mailers but the quality is going to be ass. This is a comparison of Poly mailers which we use a SHIT ton of at FulfillmentMAX
These are way thinner than ULINE, get dirty in the mail, they don’t have a tear strip for the customer to open easily, and that little clear thing gets stuck to your hands after packing like 50 orders. I fucking hate these fuckass mailers (but they are cheaper)
This is ULINE mailer, these are great… A little pricy at first but it looks really good, it’s super thick and structured for quick packing (I can do like 200 orders per hour with these fuckers), also has the tear strip and static electricity is never a problem
The Thing you need to know though is that if your product is glass or breakable, the package handlers at USPS, UPS, or FedEX hate their jobs. They will throw your packages, step on them, smash them with other packages, kick them, etc. Often intentionally. I used to load UPS trucks at 3AM and when you get pissed off because you’re tired from pulling heavy boxes off a belt at rapid speed for 6 hours, you throw a package into the back of the truck like you’re Shoei Otani in the 9th inning. It’s just the nature of how shipping companies work.
That being said, you need to protect your product if its breakable. Poly mailers are great for clothes and soft goods. I would be comfortable doing like supplements in plastic capsule bottles as well because they won’t get damaged.
For stuff like supplements in glass dropper bottle, these are usually packaged again in a little box, so I’d be comfortable putting them in a bubble mailer. As long as less than 1% of them break, it’s pretty negligible from a cost standpoint. In this case some orders will still break but most don’t.
If you have something more fragile than that, you need to put it in a box. We used to ship the Stealth Privacy Case. It was a phone case with a glass privacy screen protector. We started in bubble mailers and SO many would break. We eventually upgraded to 6x6x9 box and put them in horizontally. Even without some kind of void fill / bubble wrap, this significantly helped the issue.
Note, ULINE is more expensive than local packaging suppliers, you can look up packaging supplier near me for your area and something will exist. Near us in Gardena, we have South Bay Packaging. The problem with them though is that they invoice 3 days late and their product is so much worse than ULINE.
