Guest Post: Everything You Need to Know About Custom Shipping Boxes

For small or medium-sized businesses, custom shipping boxes can offer an excellent way to improve brand loyalty, increase brand awareness with an amazing unboxing experience, and reduce costs. 

Before you start using custom shipping boxes, it’s important to understand which types of boxes are the best ones for your shipping needs, as well as options for how to customize them. You should also be aware of the disadvantages they come with so you can decide whether they are the right choice for you or not.

What are Custom Shipping Boxes?

Custom shipping boxes are packaging developed to the requirements of a specific e-commerce business. Small businesses can ultimately decide what the perfect packaging for their products should look like, including their ideas on design, dimensions, shapes, and other factors.

Benefits of Using Custom Shipping Boxes

As stated above, customized boxes for shipping come with some great benefits for small and medium-sized businesses. We’ve identified these five benefits that might inspire you to switch your packaging to customized shipping boxes. They can:

• Ensure a wonderful unboxing experience
• Improve brand exposure and loyalty
• Protect the planet with eco-friendly features
• Increase the durability of packages
• Get the perfect size box for any type of product

All these benefits deserve a bit more explanation, so let’s take a look at them one by one.

Provide a wonderful unboxing experience

E-commerce merchants who want to make their products feel more exciting beyond the original purchase can look at custom boxes as an option. Creating a great, customized unboxing experience can help make your customers feel special, and inspire positive emotions that will keep them coming back time and time again.

Improve brand exposure and loyalty

Around 40% of consumers claim they always publish a present or package on their social media accounts if they come in unique branded boxes. Brand awareness does not only come from paid advertisements – you can inspire your customers to become advocates for your brand by delivering custom shipping boxes that surprise and delight.

Social media networks are without a doubt the most effective advertising tool for small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses, and if a customer shares your products and talks about your brand through their own social accounts, these platforms become even more effective by providing word-of-mouth promotion.

Recommendations are a great way to reach a larger customer base – in fact, word-of-mouth promotions inspire $6 trillion in purchases per year. This data only solidifies the fact that branding with packaging is a great way to improve your sales and make your brand more recognizable.

Eco-friendly features

While not always the case, it is worth mentioning that there are many packaging companies that do use 100% recyclable materials, which means their products don’t harm the environment.

As a responsible e-commerce business owner, it’s important to do what you can to take care of Planet Earth – first and foremost to ensure the stability and well-being of future generations, and as an added bonus, your customers will surely appreciate your sustainability efforts.

Package durability

There are several different ways to fill packages and protect the products that you are selling. However, that won’t mean a lot if your packages aren’t well-constructed. Keep in mind that every package passes through multiple hands on its way to your customer, from you and your teammates, to the carrier’s employees, and so on. If you offer products internationally, then the package needs to keep the same quality for days or weeks. The durability of the custom shipping boxes is often top-notch, and that’s especially true if you collaborate with highly professional packaging and branding companies such as Arka.

Utilize the perfect package size for your products

With custom boxes, not only do you get to customize the designs and materials of your packaging, you can also customize your box sizes. As you probably know, shipping fees depend on the weight and size of the box – by customizing your box sizes to minimize empty space in each package, you’ll optimize your overall shipping costs.

Drawbacks of Customized Shipping Boxes

Custom boxes for shipping can also come with certain disadvantages, which e-commerce business owners should know in order to thoughtfully weigh the pros and cons.

Custom shipping boxes can complicate shipping insurance

Shipping insurance is crucial for many e-commerce businesses, especially those that operate internationally, but insurance providers may not cover packages if the box indicates what’s inside.

The cost of custom shipping boxes might seem too high

While it’s true that using custom shipping boxes might be more expensive than other generic options, they actually aren’t as expensive as you might think (but more on that later).

Options for Customizing Shipping Boxes

There are a variety of different packaging and printing variants that you can choose from to customize your shipping boxes. To determine the right unique custom-printed box for your e-commerce business and the products you sell, you will have to think through several specific details.

First and foremost, you should decide on the shape of the box – if you want to reduce the empty space within the box, then you can experiment with shapes that best help you meet that goal. Also, your printing should be connected with your brand logo and colors – there are a few different options for how to print your design on the surface of the box. Additionally, some people decide on stickers instead of printing (one of the cheaper alternatives).

It’s also important to pay attention to the infill of the package, which can offer layers of protection that are unique and suitable with your specific box designs. 

Flexographic Printing vs. Screen Printing vs. Digital Printing

There are three different versions of custom-printed boxes:

• Flexographic printing: To complete the process, you will need to get an inked image and transfer it to the surface of the box. After that, you can use sheeting, embossing, die cutting, or other options to customize your packaging. The production is fairly cheap and allows you to experiment with different substrates. 
• Screen printing: Compared to the two other methods of printing, this is the oldest one, and is also known as silk screen printing. In the past, artists used silk for meshing the print through. These printings are also weather-resistant, which makes them the most durable on this list.
• Digital printing – This is actually a direct printing process – you can easily compare it to the computer printers we use at home. Throughout the process, you do not have to use plates. The CMYK color spectrum will be printed directly on the box. That makes this method the quickest one! 

What Box Should I Use for Shipping?

There is no one size fits all here – it depends on different factors, which we run through here below:

Custom Shipping Boxes vs. Custom Poly Mailers

At Arka, we’ve noticed that many entrepreneurs want to know whether custom poly mailers are better than shipping boxes for their business. The answer is: it depends! Here are the characteristics of both to help you identify the packaging best suited for you:

How Much Do Custom Shipping Boxes Cost?

Customized shipping boxes do not have a fixed price, and there are many factors that can influence cost. However, you might be surprised by how affordable they can actually be. Some factors that influence the price are:

• The material they are made of
• Size and shape
• The number of boxes you order in total (in case you don’t want to design them alone)
•  Design you require
• Structure of the infill (in case you have requirements)
• Additional requirements you may have 

How Long Do You Need to Wait to Get Custom Boxes for Shipping?

As with other topics covered in this post, there are many factors that can influence the length of time for the entire process. First and foremost, it depends on the number of boxes you plan to get, as well as your design requirements. Meeting certain design requirements requires a more detailed process, which takes more time. Before the process even starts, communicate with the businesses you’d like to work with to determine how long it will take.

Where to Get Custom Shipping Boxes?

There are many brand experience experts online who offer custom shipping box options. One differentiator you might consider when vetting your options is the values that these businesses share. Arka, for instance, does not only want to improve your brand awareness and help you meet other business-specific needs – they also worry about the health of Planet Earth, which is why their boxes are made of sustainable and eco-friendly materials. 

This guest post was contributed by Arka and written by Ilija Milošević. Working with Arka’s professionals can help boost your brand, convert first-time purchasers into loyal customers, and keep your reputation by offering sustainable packages. You will also enjoy affordable prices, the lowest minimums, and an extremely prompt turnaround time.