Before changing anything, time one normal order with a stopwatch. Most sellers find a 5-minute parcel contains ~90 seconds of actual packing and 3.5 minutes of walking, hunting and deciding.
How to time it
- Pick a normal order (not the easiest one);
- Start when you pick up the order; stop when the label is on and it is in the outbound area;
- Split the time into the four buckets and write it down.
The four buckets
| Bucket | What it looks like | Typical share |
|---|---|---|
| Hands-on | Wrapping, boxing, sealing | Usually the smallest |
| Walking & fetching | Tape, boxes, fill, scissors, printer | Usually the biggest |
| Deciding | Which box, how much fill, whether to add a note | Bigger than expected |
| Admin | Finding the order, checking address, labelling | Second biggest on a poor setup |
The shares matter more than the total. Five minutes with four of walking and five minutes with four of wrapping are different problems.
A worked example
A shea-butter seller took ~4 minutes per order: 55 s actual packing, 45 s finding the order in chat, 40 s fetching/cutting bubble, 30 s choosing a box, and the rest walking between rooms. After moving everything into one crate, pre-cutting 60 bubble lengths, cutting five box sizes to two and batching by task, she reached ~2.2 minutes per order.
Practical tip
Fix only the biggest bucket first, then time another order a week later. Don’t change ten things at once — you won’t know which one worked.
To do this automatically, run the Pack Speed Optimizer — it walks you through the split and returns the matching fixes.