Shipping fragile things

The message says "it arrived in pieces" and there's a photo of your product in four bits, with the box in the background looking completely fine from the outside.

Three things fix most of this, and none of them are a fragile sticker. Double-box anything genuinely breakable, so the product sits in an inner box that floats inside an outer one. Drop-test your own parcel on your own floor, on a corner, before you send a single order out. And photograph the sealed parcel before it leaves, because a courier claim without evidence of how it was packed gets refused, and roughly the first thing a claims handler will suggest is that your packing was inadequate.

A seller running a 6% breakage rate on a $9 bottle is losing more than the packaging upgrade costs, every single month, and has usually never done the drop test that would tell them why.

Double-boxing, done properly

Double-boxing isn't two boxes. It's a product held still in a small box, and that small box suspended inside a bigger one so nothing rigid connects the two.

The build, in order:

1. Wrap the product itself, with extra attention to the weak point. Handles, spouts, rims, stems, corners. Wrap those separately before you wrap the whole thing.
2. Put it in an inner box sized so the product can't move. Fill any gap. Shake it. If you hear anything, it isn't done.
3. Seal the inner box and treat it from now on as if it were the product.
4. Put 5cm of cushioning in the bottom of the outer box, then the inner box, then 5cm on all four sides and 5cm on top.
5. Seal the outer box across every seam.

The critical measurement is that 5cm gap on all six sides, including the bottom, which is the one people forget because they're building upwards. That gap is the whole mechanism. When the outer box takes a hit, the cushioning decelerates the inner box over a few centimetres instead of stopping it dead, and the difference between those two events is whether your product survives.

What breaks the mechanism: a snug inner box that touches an outer wall anywhere, void fill that compresses to nothing on the first impact, and a heavy inner box in a flimsy outer one.

Double-boxing costs materials, weight and volume, and volume is usually what your courier charges on. So double-box selectively: anything glass, ceramic, resin, framed, with a screen, or with a price where a single breakage wipes out several sales. A t-shirt in a poly mailer needs none of this and putting it in two boxes is money on fire.

Corners, and the part that actually breaks

Corner drops do the damage. A flat drop spreads the force across a whole face; a corner drop concentrates the same energy into one point, and that point is transmitted straight into whatever is nearest it inside.

Two cheap upgrades:

Corner pads. Foam or folded corrugated in all eight corners of the outer box. You can cut these from boxes you were throwing away, at no cost beyond ten minutes with a knife on a Sunday.

A collar or sleeve around the product's body, cut from corrugated card. It does two jobs: it stops crushing, and it holds the wrap in place so it can't unroll in transit.

Then find your weak point, because every product has exactly one. It's the place a break always starts: the handle on a mug, the neck on a bottle, the corner on a frame, the lid hinge on a tin. Look at your last five breakages. If four of them started at the same place, that's it, and protecting that one part specifically is worth more than adding padding everywhere.

The drop test, properly

Pack one parcel exactly as you'd send it, with a real product inside, sealed. Then abuse it.

• Drop it on a flat face from about a metre onto a hard floor.
• Drop it on a corner. Twice. This is the one that finds problems.
• Drop it on an edge, along the longest seam.
• Put a heavy box on top of it for a minute, because it will spend part of its journey under something.
• Shake it hard, near your ear.

Then open it and look at what moved, not just at whether it broke. Movement is the leading indicator; the break comes on the journey where the drop happens twice.

Yes, this costs you a product. One product, once, is cheaper than a month of breakages, and there is genuinely no other way to learn where your parcel fails. If your item is expensive, use a second, a factory reject or a piece you'd already written off. Weight it to match if you can, because a lighter dummy behaves differently.

Repeat the test after any change to your packing. Changing box supplier counts as a change. Board thickness varies more than sellers expect, and a box that looks identical can behave completely differently.

The general packing principles underneath all of this, the six-sided rule and what each material is actually for, are in packaging that survives the courier.

Photograph the parcel before it goes

This is the habit that costs five seconds and pays for itself the first time a claim is refused.

Take three photos of each fragile parcel, or of a representative parcel per batch if you're sending many identical ones:

1. The product wrapped, in the inner box, before you close it. This is the one that shows the cushioning and the wrap.
2. The inner box inside the outer box, with the surrounding fill visible.
3. The sealed parcel with the label showing, so the tracking number and the address are legible.

The photo that wins a claim is not the photo of the broken item. It's the intact parcel before it left you, because the argument you will have is about whether your packing met the courier's standard, and without those photos it's your word against a form.

Keep them for as long as the claims window lasts. Name the folder by the date, or keep them in the order thread on WhatsApp, which has the useful side effect of timestamping them for you.

Insurance, cover and the claim itself

Most couriers include a small amount of cover by default and sell more. Whether it's worth buying depends on numbers you have and I don't: your item value, your breakage rate, and what the extra cover costs on your rate card. Work it out rather than taking anyone's rule of thumb.

Two things to check on your own courier's terms before you rely on any of it, because both catch sellers out:

• Whether they exclude fragile goods, glass or ceramics from cover entirely. Plenty do, in which case the cover you're paying for is not the cover you think you're buying.
• What the claim window is, in days, from dispatch or from delivery. Miss it and the claim is dead regardless of the evidence.

A claim usually needs the tracking number, proof of value, photos of the damage, photos of the packaging as received, and often the packaging itself retained. So the message you send the buyer has to ask for those before they throw the box away:

Really sorry. Two quick things before you bin anything, and then I'll sort you out either way: can you send me a photo of the item and one of the box it came in, inside and out, and hang onto the packaging for a few days in case the courier wants to see it. Your replacement goes out today regardless.

"Regardless" is doing important work there. Never make the customer's refund conditional on your claim succeeding. Your dispute with the courier is not their problem, and telling them it is turns a breakage into a review. The wording for the rest of that conversation is in how to apologise and keep the customer.

If the parcel hasn't broken but vanished, the process is different, and it's in what to do when a parcel goes missing.

The arithmetic that justifies the bigger box

Sellers resist double-boxing because the cost is visible and the saving isn't. Put both on paper.

Take your breakage rate over the last three months. Not your guess, the count. Then:

Line	How to work it out
Cost per breakage	Replacement item at cost, plus postage out twice, plus packaging twice, plus your time
Breakages per month	Your actual count, not the ones that felt bad
Monthly cost of breaking things	Multiply the two
Cost of upgrading	Extra materials per parcel, times parcels per month
Postage change	Check your own rate card, because a bigger box may cross a size or weight band

The postage line is the one to check rather than assume. Courier pricing tends to step at thresholds rather than rise smoothly, so growing a box by 4cm might cost you nothing or might jump you a band. Measure your new box, look at your own bands, and decide with the number in front of you. The method for that is in how to work out delivery charges.

For most fragile sellers the upgrade wins comfortably, because a breakage costs several times the item price once you count both legs of postage and the replacement's materials. But run it. If you sell something cheap and rarely break it, the honest answer might be that your current packing is fine and you should spend the afternoon on photographs instead.

Things that shouldn't be posted at all

Some items are not shippable by a small seller at a sensible cost, and pretending otherwise is a slow way to lose money.

• Very large glass or framed pieces. Anything over about 60cm of unsupported glass is a specialist job.
• Anything with a fine protrusion, a spout, a thin stem, a delicate handle, unless you can immobilise it completely.
• Unfired or unsealed pieces, which absorb moisture and change in transit.
• Sealed liquid going by air, where pressure changes push liquid past a cap that's fine at ground level.
• Anything you've broken twice on the same route.

For those, the answers are local delivery you do yourself, collection in person, a specialist crating service, or not offering it. Saying "I don't post this one, but you can collect it or I'll deliver it within the city" is a perfectly good product page line, and it costs you fewer sales than you'd think.

If the fragile thing is going abroad, assume it gets handled two or three times more often, spends longer in transit, and lands in a claims process run in another country. Price that risk in, or decline the order.

Worked example: Deb, hot sauce, Nashville

Deb bottles small-batch hot sauce in Nashville. A bottle is $9, a three-pack $24, and she ships roughly 200 bottles a month across the US, most of them ordered through Instagram and a shop link.

Her first summer she was running about 5% breakage, which is 10 bottles a month. Each one cost her the bottle at roughly $3 of ingredients and glass, postage twice, a replacement box, and an apology. She called it $14 a breakage all in, so about $140 a month, and that's before the two customers who didn't reorder.

She was single-boxing, bottles wrapped in bubble wrap with paper on top.

What she changed:

1. Shrink band on every cap, then each bottle sealed in its own poly bag. A leak from one broken bottle used to ruin the other two in a three-pack, so this alone changed a $27 loss into a $9 one.
2. Bubble wrap around the neck first, then the body. Her drop test showed the neck was where every single break started.
3. A moulded inner box, actually just a small box with corrugated dividers cut from old cartons, so bottles never touch each other.
4. Outer box with 5cm of crumpled kraft all round.
5. Three photos per batch, kept in a dated folder.

She did the drop test eleven times over one weekend, sacrificing four bottles, which cost about $12 of product. It's the only reason she found the neck problem, and she'd been packing for a year without noticing.

Her breakage rate went to under 1%, about two bottles a month. Materials went up by a few cents a parcel, and the new box moved some orders into a different size band on her rate card, which she checked before committing rather than after.

The photos have been used twice. One claim was paid, one was refused for a reason she still disputes. Her view on it, which is worth more than the claim money: the photos changed how she packed, because it's very hard to photograph a parcel you know is badly packed and then send it anyway.

What Sailo does here, and what it doesn't

Sailo takes the order. It doesn't book the courier, print a label, buy cover, file a claim, or tell you the parcel arrived. There's no native app either, so none of the photograph-the-parcel habit is going to be prompted by anything except you.

Where the shop does help with fragile goods is before the sale, because most of the arguments about breakage are really arguments about expectation. Writing "hand-thrown, packed in a double box, and if it arrives broken I replace it, just send me a photo within 48 hours" on the product page costs nothing and changes the tone of every message that follows a breakage.

One thing worth weighing if you sell high-value fragile items: card payments give the buyer a route to dispute a charge, which some buyers of expensive breakable things care about. Card on Sailo needs a Stripe account cleared for charges, and Sailo takes 1–3% of the goods on each card order, which is 9 cents to 27 cents on a $9 bottle. At Deb's volume the rate is the real number to weigh — the free plan settles cards without a subscription — and on bank transfer or cash there's no fee at all because Sailo never touches that money.

The order of operations still holds on manual rails, and it matters more with fragile goods because your packing time is expensive: confirm the payment landed, then pack, then ship.

Sacrifice one product this weekend

Pack one parcel exactly as you send them now. Seal it. Drop it on a corner from a metre, twice, then on an edge, then stand a heavy box on it for a minute.

Open it and find the one part that moved or broke first. That's your weak point, and protecting that one part is most of the fix.

Then rebuild the same parcel as a double box with 5cm all round, and drop it again. Two parcels, one lost product, an hour of your Saturday, and you'll have a fragile packing standard you can describe to a claims handler with photographs to match. The extras that go in the box alongside all that protection are worth deciding on purpose too, and that's in what to put in the box.