How the wrong packaging can hurt your brand, and how to avoid it?

With 40% of online consumers receiving deliveries overpacked, brands are often frowned upon over the unnecessary, unsustainable packaging they use for their online orders.

Reusable packaging offers your business the triple advantage of better brand image, lower packaging waste and easier returns management.

The power of a great unboxing experience for your brand image

When talking about the ins and outs of e-commerce, we often hear about unboxing experiences.

Online shopping made the unboxing experience a crucial customer experience. Many customers have started sharing online the opening of the packages, and this new behaviour turned simple customers into a powerful marketing tool.

As the first direct contact between companies and consumers, packaging has to introduce the brand at its best and embody its values! Choosing packages to amaze your clients is the first step to winning them over.

In 2022, wasteful packaging will be bad for business.

Excessive packaging, plastic packaging, non-recyclable packaging: we've all experienced it first-hand during our online shopping journeys.

A recent survey by Clouder found that 72% of consumers surveyed believe that retailers use too much packaging for online orders.

While consumers want their products to be protected during transit, nobody wants the extra hassle of dealing with packaging trash. Unfortunately, e-commerce packaging does not always meet this demand. It can often be a product packed in a polybag, dropped inside a plain corrugated box and overpacked with air pillows to cushion the blows.

For consumers taking steps to be more sustainable, waste packaging can feel like direct sabotage.

This isn't good for your brand's reputation – especially when 'packaging fails' regularly pop up on social media:

Excessive packaging is not just an annoyance to consumers. Oversize boxes waste transport space. Shipping empty space doesn't make sense – it's wasteful both environmentally and financially.

Designing waste out of the system with reusables

As observed in Clouder's report, 62% of respondents would feel more positively about a brand if it consciously tried to cut down the amount of unnecessary packaging.

What about minimal single-use packaging?

The impact of single-use plastic is not exactly a secret in 2021, but what about 'recyclable' packaging?

While recyclable packaging does exist, there remains a severe lack of transparency over the process. Many countries don't allow soft plastics recycling, requiring specialist systems to sort.

This means it goes straight into the landfill – a major blow for conscious consumers trying to do the right thing.

The costly hassle of customer returns

Brands must also be thinking about the post-purchase experience – which means the possibility of returns. No matter how many orders you ship out, there's always going to be a percentage that bounces back into your warehouse – sometimes as high as 60%.

Yet this is made more difficult by single-use packaging designs that force customers to source their own packaging to send items back.

Circular economy models are one promising way to tackle the problem.

Scandinavian Outdoor is a great example of a brand that took the initiative to use reusable, waste-free delivery packaging and minimal protective materials for their online orders and improved their reputation, allowing easier returns management and saving costs!

By choosing reusable packaging with RePack, Scandinavian Outdoor became more sustainable, saved money, and made customers happy with the Net Promoter Score of 80!

In short, there are no real downsides. So, why not get started for your own business?

💡 Are you looking for reusable packaging solutions?

In a rapidly evolving e-commerce world, it is vital to have a trusted packaging provider to ship your products! RePack works with 200+ online brands already, with an average 72 NPS score.