Until fairly recently, the way retail goods were packed for shipment had little impact on business costs and performance; merchandise was simply bulk-packed for store replenishment. That was, until the boom in internet sales and the supercharged use of transit packaging for direct-to-consumer orders.
Credit: Packsize
Fulfilling thousands of individual small orders a day, all of varying sizes and each requiring appropriately sized protective packaging, has changed the dynamics and relative costs of transit packaging, impacting margins. For many years, the high costs of labour-intensive packing lines, using a fixed range of box sizes, were seen by many businesses as ‘absorbable’, but now, as online order volumes continue to grow, an inflexion point has been reached where companies are now eagerly looking for ways to radically trim costs and boost performance.
According to the ONS Retail Sales Index, online sales consistently captured 27.4% of all UK retail spending across 2025, rising to 29.9% in Q4 2025. And giving an idea of what this means in terms of the volume of packages carried, Ofcom’s 2025 Annual Parcel Report found that 4.2 billion parcels were sent and received by UK consumers in 2024.
Businesses faced with this significant shift to e-commerce orders have been challenged by the need to find efficient processes for picking, packing and dispatching orders of single and small-number items at great speed, creating as little material wastage as possible, all within the major constraints of scarce labour availability, rising labour costs and the fast-paced introduction of environmental legislation that has significant implications for process, material usage and costs.
What has become clear is that the most obvious way to minimise material usage and cost is to make sure that each box used to protect an order during transit is exactly the right size needed for that particular order – and this needs to be repeated for each and every order processed for dispatch. This is why automated right-size boxing solutions are being adopted by both large and smaller enterprises worldwide.
The business leading the ‘right size’ revolution is Packsize. The company has built an international reputation for cutting-edge ‘right-size’ technology, offering a complete range of fully- and semi-automated on-demand packaging solutions, capable of producing robust and sustainable corrugated boxes for transit, each tailored to be exactly the ‘right-size’ for the product or order – saving an average of 40% of empty space per package.
Scalable solutions are available to suit every size of business, from those with low volume needs – and yet with a wide diversity of product sizes and shapes – to fast-moving, high-volume ecommerce brands with a requirement to cope with strong peaks and fast throughput of a wide profile of goods, as well as single and multi-item orders. Versatility, speed and precision are brought together in automated systems capable of producing perfectly formed and sealed right-size boxes at speeds of up to 1300 packages per hour.
Packsize’s innovative technology can also provide a continuous, integrated solution for picking and fulfilment operations, with box-first or box-last formats – and even flexing between both on the fly. Creating a right-size tray for each order, then picking to the tray and lidding after, eliminates the need for plastic pick-totes and offers complete flexibility for multi-functional picking and packing operations.
Credit: Packsize
According to Packsize, across their solutions, customers see average corrugated material savings of around 30%, package volume reductions of up to 40%, and approximately 80% less void fill is used. Fully automated systems can also commonly deliver the equivalent output of around 20 manual packing stations, creating significant labour efficiencies. These results vary depending on the customer’s products, order profile, and their existing operation.
As average box size reductions of 40% are regularly experienced by customers, it’s possible to load many more packages onto a single vehicle, offering the potential to reduce the number of vehicles used, saving fuel and carbon emissions – all important cost-saving factors with significant environmental gains.
When it comes to installation, Packsize supports both brownfield and greenfield projects. The company is highly proficient at integrating solutions into existing infrastructure and warehouse processes, and when engaging in a greenfield project, involving Packsize early on allows packaging to be considered as part of the overall system design – creating greater opportunities to optimise the complete material flow and overall efficiency of the operation.
Although Packsize’s top-end systems are highly sophisticated, they are essentially plug-and-play, with straightforward integration into existing warehouse operations and seamless connectivity to the customer’s WMS.