The Best Ways to Prepare Your Pallets for Shipping

The Best Ways to Prepare Your Pallets for Shipping

January 22, 2020

When you prepare a load for shipping, you’ll likely use pallets—portable wooden platforms that make loading, unloading and transport easier on everyone involved. Using proper pallet preparation techniques also protects the integrity of your shipment from beginning to end, ensuring there are no unpleasant surprises during the unloading and unwrapping process.

To maximize your pallets’ efficiency, you should follow these best practices for palletizing your next shipment. After you’ve finished your shipping pallet prep in North Charleston, SC, call All Points Shipping to send it to its destination:

  • The materials matter: This is not the time to skimp on packing materials—choose new, high quality boxes, inner cushioning and heavy-duty packing tape. You want to cushion the shipment while also ensuring that the containers don’t break open halfway to their destination.
  • Handle with care: Packing each individual box can be boiled down to one simple tip: make sure there’s no empty space. When you have empty space in a shipping box, the contents can get crushed. To combat this, use packing peanuts, cardboard inserts, air pillows or bubble wrap. Alternatively, you can fill the box with smaller items to fill any voids.
  • Stack it high (but not too high): This is just a matter of common sense—put your heavier boxes on the bottom of each pallet, saving the lighter ones for the top rows. It’s also important not to stack the boxes too high, and keep the weight distributed evenly across the entire pallet—otherwise, they may tip, crash, crush and spill their contents during loading or unloading.
  • Be sure to stabilize: To help stabilize as you stack, line each layer of boxes with a layer of flat cardboard on both the bottom and the top. This helps distribute weight, fill empty spaces and prevent your corners from being crushed.
  • Wrap it up: Finally, it’s time to shrink wrap your pallet. Again, this is not the time to skimp—you need at least three to five wraps in order to ensure that the pallet is stable and won’t come apart during shipping. Using high quality, 60-gauge or better shrink wrap, start at the bottom and work your way up to the top.

Taking the extra time and care to wrap your pallets properly will only benefit you. While you may invest slightly more time in the beginning, it will be worth it when your items arrive at their destination, pristine and ready to make their way into the world.

Get help with pallet preparation in North Charleston, SC

For all your freight transport needs, All Points Transport has over a decade of experience serving the North Charleston area and beyond. We offer a wide variety of services, including port drayage, long-distance transport, hazmat shipping, intermodal shipping and more. Our dedication to safety, timeliness and customer service make us a team to trust. Contact us today to get started on your next freight shipping project, and you’ll see why our customers keep coming back. We look forward to working with you!

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