how many items can you realistically ship per day?

[AffiliateDreamer]

I see some ebay sellers doing like 200 transactions a day. This seller is selling fairly small item stuff, say the average item is like $5-10, and each customer buys maybe 3-4 items. So 200 transactions, with 600+ items. The items are new btw.

How many people would it take to day-in-day-out ship 200 items?

I'm guessing here, but i'd say with all the items packaged up it would be the size of a textbook but weight much much less.

[ogletree]

Just pack a few items and time yourself.

[jwolthuis]

That's tough to estimate. Are you packing fragile glass widgets, or bricks?

If the items are simple to pack, and just require some peanuts, tape, and a shipping label, one person could probably do 50-80 packages per 8-hour shift.

One the other hand, if they must be carefully wrapped, hand-packed, and double-boxed, you might only get 20 per day.

These are extimates, and include breaks, time for chit-chat, etc. I'm sure you could double this output if you skip breaks and pick up the pace.

[Rugles]

>>>How many people would it take to day-in-day-out ship 200 items?

The answer is..... between 2 and 3!

Of course that has be stuff that is easy to ship, they have to have proper supplies, and can not be responsible for receiving packages as well.

[AffiliateDreamer]

I see, so its a bigger operation that one might think!

Not to mention the EMAILS one must recieve from 200 orders each and every day, and previous customers emailing along with potential customers emailing.

yikes!

[kris_winter]

Id say 3. I can do about 80 packages a day and i have a easy product to package. Thats hard work though. It would also depend a lot on the shipping system your using. International express packages that cross customs borders generally take a lot longer than something local that uses economy mail.

[badass101]

Remember that when you're thinking of how many packages one person can pack it depends if he's the guy running the online shop too, as while he's packing he can't be checking incoming orders, etc.

If you've got a person in charge of the shop and a person who's just there to pick/pack items then I would estimate that the pick/pack only guy will be able to turnover at least 50% more packages than the 'one man' on his own.

[wingslevel]

we average 50 packages a day per person in the shipping department

[shri]

Ah.. now you know why I asked people about what sort of packaging they use.

The number of packages can vary a lot by how you organise your inventory and how you pack it.

Look at standardised bins for inventory and standard boxes for packaging. Then look at the workflow.. what does it take to get the order out of the door from the moment you've got the credit card notification. Include time spent to verify credit card orders, verify addresses (you'd be surprised how many gift orders have invalid addresses in our case)... list goes on.

[jsinger]

Related question: How many shipments have significant packing/shipping errors? Our rate is below 0.5% but I think the national average is far more.

cf. Chance of getting food order correct from a KFC drive-thru is maybe 50/50

[sniffer]

Even if you're just shoving them in post bags and whacking a label on the front, 200 per day is a big job. There's always time consuming things like recording tracking numbers

[sgg24]

I think that if you're doing the postage and packing on your own, 200 is far too many; but why not employ somebody to do it for you?

I work for a network marketing company where all I have to do is bring people to the site and they take the orders and ship it direct to the customer.

I don't have to worry about shipping and charging to forty-plus countries we ship to - I just collect the commission! :)