How to pack and ship fragile items in India — jewellery, candles, glass, décor and cakes, by courier

TL;DR

• • The shake test: close the box and shake it. Any movement or sound means more fill.
• • Double box anything made of glass, ceramic, clay or wax: item wrapped, inner box, fill, outer box.
• • Fragile stickers are a request, not a guarantee. Use them; pack as if they were not there.
• • Insurance exists only where your courier offers it, per parcel, with its own rules. Ask before you need it.
• • Three photos per parcel: item, open packed box, sealed box with label. They settle disputes with couriers and customers.
• • Say it on the listing: how it is packed, what to do if it arrives broken, and by when.

The method: double boxing, step by step

Double boxing means the item travels in a box inside a box, with cushioning between them. The inner box takes the knocks; the outer box takes the stacking, the rain and the tape gun. It is slower than throwing an item in a mailer, and it is why professional sellers of glass and candles have low breakage.

1. Wrap the item on its own. Bubble wrap, bubbles facing in, taped shut. Wrap handles, spouts, rims and feet a second time; they break first.
2. Fill anything hollow. A mug, a vase, a jar: stuff it with crumpled paper so the walls cannot flex.
3. Inner box. A snug box with a little fill so the wrapped item does not touch the walls. Two items in one inner box must have a divider or a layer of fill between them; no glass-to-glass contact anywhere.
4. Outer box. At least 5 cm bigger than the inner box on every side. Put a layer of fill on the bottom, place the inner box in the centre, fill all four sides and the top. Press down; if the fill compresses easily, add more.
5. Shake it. Nothing should move or sound.
6. Tape in an H. One strip along the centre seam, one along each edge seam, on both top and bottom. Tape the corners if the box is heavy.
7. Sticker and arrows. A fragile sticker on two sides and “this way up” arrows if the item must stay upright. Then the label, flat, on the largest face.

For fill, use crumpled kraft paper, honeycomb paper, air pillows or bubble wrap. Avoid loose thermocol beads (they shift and leave gaps) and newspaper against anything the buyer will eat or wear (the ink transfers). Shredded paper is fine for small items, not for heavy ones. Decorative tissue and a ribbon go inside the inner box, where they are seen, not in the outer box, where they do nothing.

Item by item: what breaks and how to stop it

Two of these deserve a longer note. Jewellery rarely breaks in a courier; it goes missing, or arrives as a knot. A small rigid box inside a padded mailer solves the knot, and a tracked service with a signature solves most of the missing. For anything above a few thousand rupees, consider a plain outer box rather than a branded one, so the parcel does not announce what is inside. Cakes are the item people most want to courier and the one you mostly cannot. National couriers generally do not accept perishable food, and a cream cake will not survive two days in a hub in any case. Sell cakes as same-city, same-day delivery, by you or a local rider, and keep your delivery area small. Dry bakes travel: cookies, brownies and plum cakes do well in an airtight tin inside a box with fill. The full picture is in how to sell homemade cakes and plum cakes online.

What a “fragile” sticker does, and what it does not

A fragile sticker tells the people who touch the parcel that you would like them to be careful. Some will be. But a parcel in India changes hands many times (pickup rider, hub, line-haul truck, destination hub, delivery rider) and much of the sorting is fast and partly mechanical. Nobody reads a sticker on a conveyor belt. The sticker does not buy a separate, gentler service, and it does not make the courier liable for a break.

So use one, on two sides, because it costs a rupee and helps at the two ends where a human picks up the box. Then pack as though it were not there. “This way up” arrows are more useful than the word fragile for candles, planters and anything with a lid, because a parcel that stays upright is a parcel that is not resting on its weakest side.

Insurance, where the courier offers it

Some couriers and aggregators offer shipment protection or insurance as a per-parcel add-on for a fee. Terms differ: a declared value you set, a cap on the payout, a short window to raise a claim (often a few days from delivery), and a list of proof they want, usually photos of the outer box, the inner packing and the damaged item, plus your invoice. Some exclude fragile categories entirely or require their own packaging standard. None of this is standard across couriers, so ask yours three questions before you need the answer: do you offer protection, what does a claim need, and how long do I have?

Whether to buy it is arithmetic. If a protection fee is a small percentage of a ₹2,500 mirror, it is worth it; on a ₹299 pair of earrings it is not, and you should instead price in a small breakage allowance (see the cost section below). Where the courier offers nothing, your allowance is your insurance.

Photograph every packed parcel

Three phone photos, thirty seconds, filed by order number: the item before wrapping, the open outer box showing the fill and the inner box, and the sealed box with its label. For anything expensive, a short video of the packing instead. These photos do two jobs. With the courier, they are the proof a claim needs and the answer to “it was packed badly”. With a customer, they turn “it arrived broken” from an argument into a shared problem: you can see your own packing was sound, so the break happened in transit, and you fix it without suspicion on either side.

Keep them for a month after delivery. A folder on your phone named by month is enough; you will need one in twenty, and when you do, you will be glad.

What to say on the product listing

Buyers of fragile things have one quiet fear: it arrives broken and nobody helps. Answer it before they ask, in three places.

• In the description: one line on packing. “Packed in a double box with cushioning on all sides.” Say it plainly; do not promise it cannot break.
• In the policy: what to do if it arrives damaged. For example: “Please record a short unboxing video or take photos of the item and the box within 48 hours of delivery and send them to us on WhatsApp. We replace or refund damaged items; please keep the packaging until it is settled.” Choose replace, refund or both, and keep that choice. Our free return policy generator gives you a draft to edit.
• Near the buy button: a short reassurance line, such as “Safely packed · Damage replaced”, only if it is true.

On a SitesPlaced store, all three are free: the product description, the policies page under Settings → Pages & policies, product badges on the product page, and short trust badges under the checkout button under Settings → Checkout. If a customer wants a gift sent with no invoice inside, the Order Notes field at checkout is where they tell you.

What good packing costs, and how to charge for it

Good packing costs money and makes the parcel bigger, and bigger parcels cost more to ship. Here is a worked example for one double-boxed ceramic mug. These are example prices to show the shape of the sum; yours will differ by city and supplier.

Example figures for illustration only. Buying boxes in packs of 50 or 100 brings the per-parcel cost down considerably.

Two more lines belong in the price. First, the bigger box. Most couriers charge on the greater of the actual weight and a “volumetric” weight worked out from the box’s dimensions; the exact formula differs by courier, so ask yours. A double-boxed mug can be billed as a heavier parcel than it is. Second, a breakage allowance. If one parcel in fifty breaks, and a replacement costs you the item plus a second delivery, spread that across all fifty and add it to the price. Then decide how to recover it: build it into the product price, or charge delivery for the heavy fragile items only. On SitesPlaced you can set one flat delivery charge for the store and add a separate delivery fee to any single product under Settings → Shipping, so the mirror carries its own charge while the earrings ship on the flat rate. How to set shipping charges for your online store walks through the choices, and how to price your products covers the rest of the sum.

Before the first fragile order goes out

• Send one to yourself. Pack a sample exactly as you would for a customer and courier it to a friend in another city. Open it together on a video call. This costs one delivery and saves you ten.
• Buy boxes in two sizes that nest, so every inner box has a matching outer. Guessing box sizes from a stationery shop on dispatch day is how gaps happen.
• Pick dispatch days. Monday to Wednesday for wax and chocolate, so nothing sits in a hub over a weekend.
• Get the label right. Clear name, full address, landmark, pincode and phone, printed if you can. Everything about labels, including international ones, is in shipping labels for a small online store. For the pickup-and-courier routine itself, see how to ship orders from home in India.
• Make the unboxing nice inside the inner box. Tissue, a card, a thank-you note. The outer box is armour; the inner box is the gift. If you sell for the festive season, packaging and gift-wrapping ideas for an online store has the pretty half of this job.

Frequently asked questions