Packing orders faster

It's 9:40 at night, you've got 14 parcels to get out, and you've been at it since 8. The courier collects at 11 tomorrow morning. Somewhere in the middle of this you ran out of tape and drove to a shop.

Time one parcel with a stopwatch before you change anything. Most sellers who do this discover that a 5-minute parcel contains about 90 seconds of actual packing, and three and a half minutes of walking to fetch something, deciding which box, hunting for the order details and cutting bubble wrap to a length they've cut 40 times before. You don't get faster by wrapping faster. You get faster by removing the other three and a half minutes.

Then you pack to the courier's cut-off rather than to the order, and the evening stops being open-ended.

Time one parcel, honestly

Do it on a normal order, not a simple one. Start the timer when you pick up the order and stop it when the label's on and the parcel's by the door. Write down where the time went in four buckets:

Bucket	What it looks like	Typical share
Hands on product	Wrapping, boxing, sealing	The smallest bucket, usually
Walking and fetching	Tape, boxes, fill, scissors, the printer	The biggest, usually
Deciding	Which box, how much fill, whether this needs a note	Bigger than anyone expects
Admin	Finding the order, checking the address, writing the label	Second biggest on a bad setup

The shares matter more than the total. A seller packing at five minutes a parcel with four minutes of walking has an entirely different problem from one at five minutes with four minutes of wrapping, and the fixes have nothing in common.

Do this once, on one parcel. It's the only diagnostic in this article and everything else follows from it.

The three thieves

Walking. Every trip to the other room is fifteen to forty seconds, and you'll make eight of them per session even when you think you're organised. The fix is not discipline, it's layout. Everything you touch during packing has to be within arm's reach of where you stand.

Deciding. "Which box?" is a decision you make once per parcel and it costs five to ten seconds each time, plus the occasional wrong choice you have to redo. Reduce your box range to three sizes and write the rule down: small box for one to two bars, medium for three to six, mailer for anything soft. Now it isn't a decision, it's a lookup.

Hunting. Scrolling back through a chat to find whether she wanted the lavender or the rose is the most expensive thirty seconds in the whole process, because it also breaks your rhythm. The order needs to exist in one written place, with the item, the options, the address and the total, before you start packing anything.

Batch by task, not by order

This is the single biggest change and it feels wrong the first time.

The instinctive way to pack twelve orders is one at a time: fetch, wrap, box, fill, seal, label, next. The fast way is to do each step twelve times.

1. Pick everything for all twelve orders and lay them out in twelve piles, in the same order as your list.
2. Wrap all twelve.
3. Box all twelve.
4. Fill and seal all twelve.
5. Label all twelve.

You stop switching tools, you stop re-deciding, and your hands learn the movement by the third repetition. Sellers who switch to this typically cut their per-parcel time by a third or more on a batch of ten, and the gain grows with the batch.

Two conditions where it doesn't work. If every order is completely different, made-to-order furniture, personalised work, the batching gain shrinks, though the pick-everything-first step still helps. And if your parcels are big enough that twelve half-packed boxes won't fit on your table, you batch in groups of four instead. The principle survives; the number changes.

The one step never to batch is the address check. Twelve labels laid out next to twelve boxes is exactly how the wrong label goes on the wrong parcel, which is the most expensive packing error there is, because it's two failures and two apologies.

The station

You need a metre of surface at a height where you're not bending. Bending is what makes packing feel exhausting rather than boring, and exhausting is what makes you stop after nine parcels.

Fixed positions, same every time:

• Tape on your dominant side, in a tape gun. A tape gun over hand-tearing saves a few seconds per parcel and about an hour a month at 100 parcels.
• Scissors on a string or in a pot. The single most-lost object in any packing setup.
• Void fill in an open bin under the table, not in a bag you have to untie.
• Boxes flat-packed and leaning against the table leg, in the three sizes, not stacked in a cupboard.
• A bin for offcuts, positioned so you don't turn around.
• Your phone or laptop propped at eye level with the order list open, not lying flat where you have to lean over it.

If you pack on the kitchen table and have to clear it every night, put the whole station in one crate you can lift out and put back in ninety seconds. The setup cost is what stops people packing in short bursts, and short bursts are how a person with a job gets orders out.

Pre-kit on the quiet day

Packing time is expensive because it happens at 9pm when you're tired. Preparation time is cheap because it happens whenever you like, and it can happen in front of the television.

Things to pre-make in batches of fifty:

• Bubble wrap cut to your standard length.
• Boxes taped along the bottom seam, ready to open.
• Thank-you cards written, if you write them. Do fifty at once with a podcast on.
• Filler bags portioned.
• Address slips for inside the box, if you use them, which you should. A second address inside is the only thing that saves a parcel whose outer label gets destroyed.

Ten minutes of pre-cutting has saved most sellers thirty to forty minutes on a busy evening. It's the habit in this article that pays back the most and reads as the most boring, which is why almost nobody does it.

The pick list, and stopping mispicks

Write the orders out in one list before you touch anything: name, item, options, quantity. Print it or keep it on a screen at eye level.

Then pick in list order, physically, one row at a time, and tick each row as you place the item on the table. Not from memory, not by holding four orders in your head.

The check that catches almost everything: when you seal each parcel, read the row out loud against what's in your hand. "Alice, three bars, lavender, rose, oatmeal." Saying it out loud engages a different part of your attention than reading it does, and it's the reason experienced packers mutter.

A mispick costs you the item, the postage twice, the apology and often the customer. Two seconds of muttering is a cheap insurance premium.

Labels in one run

If you're writing labels by hand, write them all at once before you start packing, and lay them face down in list order.

If you're printing, print the whole batch in one go. The individual print job is what breaks the rhythm, because a printer takes twenty seconds of your attention and gives you back a piece of paper you then have to cut and tape.

A thermal label printer removes the cutting, the taping and the ink entirely, and for a lot of sellers it's the first piece of equipment worth buying. Don't take a general recommendation for it, though. Work out how many parcels a week you send, time your current label step, and multiply. If the label step is 40 seconds and you send 25 parcels a week, that's about 17 minutes a week, and you can decide for yourself whether the machine earns that back at whatever it costs where you are.

Pack to the cut-off, not to the pile

The organising fact of your packing day is the courier's collection or drop-off time, not the number of orders sitting there.

Work backwards from it. If collection is 11am and you can pack 12 parcels an hour, the last useful hour to start is 9am. Anything that arrives after your own cut-off goes in tomorrow's batch, and that's a decision you make once rather than a guilt you carry every evening.

Publish the cut-off to buyers as well: "orders placed after 2pm go out the next working day". Now the buyer's expectations and your packing schedule are the same fact, and you're not sprinting at 10pm to save a promise nobody asked you to make. How to phrase the delivery window is part of how to work out delivery charges, and choosing a courier whose cut-off and pickup actually suit your day is in choosing a courier you can trust.

Where speed becomes an expensive mistake

Four checks are worth keeping even when you're behind. Each takes seconds and each prevents a failure that costs an hour.

1. The address, read against the order once. Out loud.
2. The shake test. Seal the parcel, shake it near your ear. If something moves, it isn't packed. The full method for making sure it survives the journey is in packaging that survives the courier.
3. The item against the row. Colour, size, quantity.
4. Money confirmed before the parcel goes. On bank transfer especially. The sequence is: payment seen in your account, then pack, then ship. Packing first is how you end up posting goods you were never paid for, and it happens on exactly the nights you're trying to go fast.

Everything else can be sped up. These four are where speed turns into cost.

Worked example: Nadia, shea body butter, Nairobi

Nadia makes whipped shea butter in Nairobi, KSh 850 a jar and KSh 2,300 for a set of three. She does around 120 orders a month, mostly ordered through Instagram and WhatsApp, paid by M-Pesa till, delivered by boda rider inside Nairobi and by courier upcountry.

She was packing three evenings a week, roughly two and a half hours each time, which is about 7.5 hours for 120 parcels. Just under four minutes a parcel.

She timed one parcel and the breakdown was uncomfortable: 55 seconds of actual packing, 45 seconds finding the order in WhatsApp, 40 seconds fetching and cutting bubble wrap, 30 seconds picking a box, and the rest walking between the kitchen and the bedroom where the jars were.

What she changed:

1. Moved everything into one crate kept under the table in the front room, so setup went from ten minutes to ninety seconds.
2. Pre-cut 60 lengths of bubble wrap on a Sunday, which took 12 minutes.
3. Two box sizes only, plus mailers for the cloth bags. She'd been using five.
4. One order list on Sunday night, written out from the week's messages, in delivery-area order so the boda drops were grouped.
5. Batched by task, wrapping all the jars first, then boxing, then labelling.

Her time went to about 4.5 hours a month of packing across the same 120 parcels, so roughly 2.2 minutes each. She got back about three hours a week.

The change she rates highest is the least obvious one: writing the order list before packing night. Not because the list is clever, but because reconstructing 30 orders from WhatsApp threads while holding a jar of shea butter was where her mistakes came from. She sent two wrong orders in her worst month and none in the four months after.

The thing she'd tell anyone: the pre-cut bubble wrap felt ridiculous when she started. Twelve minutes on a Sunday to save what looked like a few seconds a parcel. Over 120 parcels it was closer to 70 minutes, and it was 70 minutes taken out of the evenings she hated and moved to a Sunday afternoon she didn't mind.

What Sailo does here, and what it doesn't

The useful part is upstream of the packing. A WhatsApp order arrives pre-written with the item, the options, the address and the total, which is exactly the 45 seconds Nadia was losing per parcel to scrolling through a chat. An order that's already written is an order you can pack from.

What it doesn't do is anything with the parcel. No label printing, no packing slips, no courier booking, no barcode scanning, no pick list generated for you. There's no native app either, so the screen you pack from is a browser tab on your phone, which matters if your kitchen has bad signal.

So the pick list is still yours to write, and for most sellers writing it out once a week by hand is fine and takes ten minutes. If you're past the point where that's fine, that's a real signal about your volume rather than a software problem to solve.

What goes into the box alongside the product, and which of those extras are worth the seconds they cost, is in what to put in the box.

Time one parcel tonight

Pick up your phone, start the stopwatch, pack the next order exactly as you normally would, and write down the four buckets: hands on product, walking, deciding, admin.

Whichever bucket is biggest is your entire packing problem, and it will not be the one you assumed. Fix that one thing this week, then pre-cut fifty lengths of whatever you cut, and time another parcel next weekend.