Note: For up-to-date guides on using Delivrd, please refer to official Delivrd documentation.

This how-to guide explains why and how you should manage your packaging materials in Delivrd, the free online order fulfillment and inventory management solution.

What are packaging materials?

Packaging materials are used in the packing phase of the order fulfillment process as containers of actual products you sell to your customer.

Delivrd only manages one, primary packaging material. If you use several different packaging materials to pack a single product (for example, you pack several pieces of a certain product into a bag, and then place several bags into a carton box), you can only manage one of them in Delivrd. In the example above, it makes sense to manage the carton box as a packaging material, but it’s up to you to decide.

There are many different packaging materials you can use, each one with its own unique characteristics.

Some examples:

Padded Envelopes:

Poly Mailer:

Carton Boxes:

 Creating Products for Packaging Materials

The first products you have to create in Delivrd are your packing materials, because when you will start creating your sell-able products, you will need to define which packaging materials are used for packing them.

Since managing packaging materials is very similar to managing any other product, creating products for packaging materials is almost identical to creating other products, with one very important difference: you have to define the product as a packaging material.

You can do this by navigating to the ‘Packaging‘ tab in the product information tab, and setting the check-mark in ‘Packaging Material?’ field:

Replenishing Packaging Materials

To replenish your packaging material stock, you create replenishment orders for your packaging materials as you would to any other product. The product receiving process is also identical – once it is completed, inventory  levels of packaging materials will be updated accordingly.

Consumption of Packaging Materials

Packaging materials are consumed during the packing process.

In Delivrd, each product you sell has a packaging material assigned to it. When a customer order is created, the packaging material is automatically added as a separate line to the customer order.

If a customer order has more than one product, more than one packaging material will be added to the order. So if the order contains 3 different products, 3 packaging materials will be added to the order. If you decide to pack all 3 products into a single packaging material (for example, into a single large padded envelope), you need to remove the packaging material lines that are not going to be used in the packing process.

When you pack your order lines, packaging materials are consumed once a shipment have been created and shipped. Inventory levels of the packaging materials are automatically decreased in accordance with the amount of packaging materials that were used for packing.

Availability of Packaging Materials

When you create a customer order, Delivrd check for sufficient inventory levels of packaging materials against the quantity required by all open customer orders.

If you have a shortage of packaging materials, Delivrd will highlight these shortages in the Edit Customer Order or View Customer Order page: