How to pack a parcel so it survives the network
What actually happens to a box in a sorting hub, and how to pack for it.
Most damage advice imagines a parcel being carried. It is not. Between your hands and the recipient’s it is tipped onto belts, slid down chutes, stacked under heavier things, and dropped from the height of a sorting machine, dozens of times, by equipment moving as fast as it can.
Pack for that and almost nothing else matters.
The box is structural, so do not reuse a tired one
Corrugated board gets its strength from the fluting inside. Once a box has been compressed, damp, or opened and taped repeatedly, that fluting is crushed and the board is carrying a fraction of what it did new.
A reused box that looks fine can be well under half its original stacking strength. If you reuse boxes, and there is nothing wrong with reusing boxes, reject any that are soft at the corners, previously wet, or already bulging.
Old labels and barcodes have to come off or be completely covered. A scanner does not know which of two barcodes is current, and the most common outcome of leaving an old one on is the parcel travelling back to wherever the old label pointed.
Fill the space, then fill it again
The single most common packing failure is an underfilled box. Contents that can move will move, for the entire journey, and each small movement is an impact.
Two things follow. Everything needs at least a few centimetres of cushioning on every side, including underneath and on top, and the box should be full enough that nothing shifts when you shake it. If you can hear movement, it is not finished.
Cushioning also has to be the right kind. Loose fill lets a dense item migrate to a corner and sit against the wall by the time it arrives. For anything heavy, suspend or brace it rather than surrounding it with something it can burrow through.
Weight goes low and central
A heavy object sitting against one wall turns every impact into a lever. The same object centred, with cushioning between it and every face, is carried by the whole box.
If you are packing several items, the heaviest goes at the bottom, each item is wrapped separately so they cannot strike each other, and anything fragile sits above rather than below the mass.
Tape: the H, and nothing decorative
Use pressure-sensitive plastic tape at least 48 mm wide. Do not use masking tape, cellophane tape, string, or paper tape without reinforcement, and never tie string around a parcel: it catches in sorting machinery and either tears the box or stops the belt.
Tape the centre seam and both edge seams on the top, then do the same underneath. That is the H pattern, and it exists because the centre seam alone splits under stacking pressure while the edges are what open when a box is dragged.
Three strips each way is the standard advice and it is not padding out the guide: the bottom is what fails when a full box is lifted by someone in a hurry.
Fragile stickers help, but not the way people think
A handling sticker does not buy careful treatment. Most sorting is automated and nothing on the outside changes the path a parcel takes through a machine.
What the marks genuinely do is communicate at the manual points: the person loading the van, the person stacking a cage, the customs officer opening it. “This way up” on a liquid, “keep dry” on something in cardboard, “fragile” on glass. Use them for that, and pack as though nobody will read them, because mostly nobody will.
The one that matters most is orientation on anything that can leak. A bottle laid on its side for eight hours in a warm van leaks past a cap that would have held upright.
The claim is decided by the packaging
This is the part that costs sellers money. When you claim for damage, the carrier assesses whether the item was packed adequately for the network. If it judges the packing inadequate, the claim fails, and it does not matter that the damage was obviously caused by their handling.
Practical consequences:
- Photograph the packed parcel before it goes, and keep the photo until the delivery is confirmed. It is the only evidence you will have.
- Keep the original packaging if a damaged item comes back. Assessors ask for it, and disposing of it usually ends the claim.
- Read what your service actually covers before assuming. Many carriers exclude or heavily limit glass, ceramics, liquids, and anything described as fragile, regardless of packing.
Envelopes and mailers
A poly mailer is fine for textiles and genuinely unbreakable goods and nothing else. It provides no compression protection at all: a mailer at the bottom of a cage carries the full weight of everything above it.
Padded envelopes are for small, flat, semi-rigid things. A padded envelope around a boxed item is not protection, it is a way of hiding the box.
Books, prints and anything that must stay flat need rigid board, not padding. The failure mode there is bending, not impact, and no amount of bubble wrap prevents a bend.
A quick sequence that works
- Pick a box a few centimetres larger than the contents on every side.
- Cushion the base first, before anything goes in.
- Wrap each item separately; heaviest at the bottom, centred.
- Fill every void until nothing moves when shaken.
- Cushion the top, then close and tape the H on both faces.
- Remove or cover every old label and barcode.
- Put the address label flat on the largest face, not over a seam or a corner.
- Photograph it.
The label detail at step seven matters more than it sounds. A label taped across the opening seam is destroyed when customs opens the parcel, and a label wrapped around a corner cannot be read by a scanner at speed, which drops the parcel into manual handling and adds days.