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Amazon: Transformational Change in E-comm Packaging Begins Upstream

At E-Pack Europe 2022, Amazon’s Jeremy Long explains how true innovation around e-commerce packaging requires an upstream strategy that involves both the product and the packaging.

Jeremy Long, Senior Manager, Product Management, Customer Packaging Experience, Amazon
Jeremy Long, Senior Manager, Product Management, Customer Packaging Experience, Amazon

The world’s largest online retailer, Amazon knows a bit about packaging, especially when it comes to consumers’ feelings about excess e-commerce packaging. After all, its Frustration Free Packaging program, introduced in 2009, was designed specifically to reduce the amount of packaging used for e-commerce products and lower the cost of delivering goods to assist in maintaining low prices for customers.

That’s why, in 2018, when it introduced its Vendor Incentive Program around FFP to promote the Ships in Own Container (SIOC) and Frustration-Free Packaging programs in its non-sort business, it was completely blindsided when the program failed to drive change.

As Jeremy Long, Senior Manager, Product Management, Customer Packaging Experience for Amazon, shared with attendees at Smithers’ E-Pack Europe 2022 conference today, the initiative was a very large step for the retailer and one that was rolled out with much optimism. “Since our Frustration Free Packaging Program started in 2009, we had never taken any kind of overt industry action before,” he said. “And so coming to the public with this idea of starting with a 12-month window to incentivize, followed by a $1.99 chargeback, this was a big deal for us. We really, really wanted to get it right. And we were really excited to have the business buy-in to offer that 12-month incentive.

“So we reached out to 25,000 contacts. We put materials together for industry journals and spent months planning a communication strategy for how we were going to launch this, how we were going to really go big and be successful at avoiding the chargeback. We wanted to convert as much of this packaging as possible.

“So fast forward 12 months later, that incentive had gone mostly unclaimed. A dollar per unit received in the new packaging format, and most of it had gone unclaimed. So we started to reassess, what did we do wrong? How did we so entirely miss the boat?”


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What Amazon learned was that despite the fact that it was communicating with the industry, it wasn’t yet touching the P&L owners.It wasnt until the chargeback actually launched, and it started hitting the P&L, that we realized that we werent really communicating with the complete audience,” said Long. “We needed to figure out how to move our communication strategy further upstream, all the way up to the product design, the product strategy, and the packaging strategy long before the product actually gets to shelves.”

Through consumer feedback, Long said Amazon has begun to realize that when it comes to e-commerce packaging, it’s “putting a square peg in a round hole.” He explained, “We are under the preconceived notion that e-commerce packaging requires putting a box on top of a retail product. And so thats where we want to take Frustration-Free Packaging to change that perception.”

Amazon’s Frustration-Free Packaging program was introduced in 2009 and was quickly followed by the SIOC program. Said Long, through these programs, Amazon has collected a tremendous amount of data. “I think most of you probably know Amazon is a fairly heavy data-oriented company,” he said. “Weve collected a lot of data, really under the auspices of identifying good products, good candidates that would meet the criteria for shipping in its own container. Criteria that we could come to our vendor portfolio with and say, ‘Here are some good opportunities that we see using data to introduce and to convert your packaging to Frustration-Free Packaging.’ This data has really sort of transformed the way we think about our packaging as a whole.”

This data has also enabled Amazon to reduce its outbound shipments in corrugated in North America and Europe from 73% five or six years ago to 36% year to date. But, said Long, Amazon is still hearing from its customers, through social media and other channels, that it’s still not enough; consumers want to eliminate the outer packaging.

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