Comments on: Something I Just Don’t Get About Shipping

By: Intelligent IKEA Packaging | Adam McFarland's Blog - Musings of a Balding 26 Year Old Entrepreneur

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:54:08 +0000

[...] They’re actually saving space as opposed to completely wasting it, ahem Yankee Candle. Imagine how much warehouse space that saves them? How many more they can fit on a truck when [...]

By: Adam McFarland

Adam McFarland — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:15:21 +0000

Wow, fascinating stuff Dave. Thanks for sharing. Tons of awesome ideas. I also found another article on the same site with more pics and info http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=3315

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:41:15 +0000

This is the article, not sure where I saw the video:

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2694

By: Adam McFarland

Adam McFarland — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:35:52 +0000

@Dave – good point about the tiers. That very well could be the case. Newegg is definitely one of those super-efficient companies that we try to model ourselves after so it would be cool to see how they handle it. I would be interested in seeing that video if you have a link handy. Like you said, I’d imagine they would have to have a ton of boxes to accommodate all of the thousands of different products they ship.

@Adam H – freaking awesome. I love it when I get an answer to a question I never thought I’d get answered

By: Adam Holland

Adam Holland — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:05:12 +0000

Coincidentally, my wife works for Yankee Candle. He’s her explanation…

If you ordered it online, then that box would’ve come from the factory in Deerfield, MA.

That kind of box with the interior egg-carton is just how they store the candles there. The “carton” is proprietary and is only made in that size… but shipping it like that ensures a safe delivery.

Associates could cut the carton and use smaller boxes for smaller orders, but they’d rather just pay the difference in shipping.

And, in my personal opinion, that shit is marked up so much anyways – they probably just eat the difference in cost of shipping, instead of creating new packaging solutions.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:28:45 +0000

Great post!

I know that the shipping companies ship based on volume, but I believe it’s also calculated on a volume tier. So if you have a 1lb box that’s 1x1x1, and costs $9 to ship…you could also have a 1lb box that’s 4x4x4, and still $9 to ship. Maybe their box fits into that same tier, regardless of the weight? It’s very possible that they did that with negotiations…though, I would think that using more packing material would outweigh the cost of a couple more cents to carry a 1-3 candle box.

I think I remember reading in an older post that you closely scrutinized Newegg’s logistic process…I’ve seen the article on Anandtech, and they have a machine that automatically feeds boxes and tapes them. I wonder how they deal with different size boxes, because something on that scale must literally need tons of sizes.