You packed 40 orders today. Two had the wrong item. One had no bubble wrap.
That is what happens when your pick and pack process lives inside your head instead of on paper. The pick and pack process is the core warehouse workflow of every ecommerce operation — it is how an order on a screen becomes a package on a courier truck. Get it right, and your fulfillment runs smoothly even when order volume spikes. Get it wrong, and you lose money on returns, reshipping, and angry customer reviews. This guide walks you through setting up a reliable pick and pack process for your Philippine ecommerce business, whether you operate from a spare bedroom or a rented warehouse.
What Is the Pick and Pack Process?
The pick and pack process is the sequence of steps between receiving an order notification and handing a sealed package to a courier for delivery. It has two phases.
Picking is retrieving the ordered items from your storage area. A pick list — generated by your order management system or manually from your marketplace dashboard — tells you what to collect. Each line on the pick list includes the product name, SKU, quantity, and ideally the storage location.
Packing is preparing the picked items for transit. This includes verifying the pick (confirming the right items and quantities), wrapping products in protective material, placing them in appropriately sized packaging, inserting any extras (thank-you cards, discount codes, invoices), sealing the package, and attaching the shipping label.
According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, the country’s ecommerce sector continues expanding, with more Filipino consumers shopping online every year. For sellers processing 20 or more orders per day, a structured pick and pack process is the difference between hitting courier pickup windows consistently and scrambling to ship orders late.
But having a process is not the same as having an efficient one. The difference between a good and bad pick and pack workflow can save you an hour of labor per day.
How to Set Up Your Pick and Pack Process: Step by Step
Step 1: Organize Your Storage by SKU and Frequency
Before thinking about pick lists or packing stations, your storage area needs structure. Every product must have a designated home — a specific shelf, bin, or section — and you (or your team) must know exactly where it is.
Start with a simple approach: group products by category, then within each category, place your fastest-selling items at eye level and within arm’s reach of your packing station. Slow-moving stock goes on higher shelves or in the back. Label every shelf or bin with the product name and SKU.
For home-based operations, this might mean dedicating one bookshelf to phone accessories, one to chargers, and a plastic storage bin to smaller items. For warehouse operations, use a zone-aisle-shelf labeling system. The key principle: your picker should never have to search for a product. If they are looking around, your storage is not organized.
Step 2: Generate and Print Pick Lists
A pick list is the document that tells the picker what to collect. You can generate pick lists in three ways:
From your OMS or inventory tool: If you use Ginee, Jubelio, or Sellercraft, the tool can generate pick lists directly from pending orders. This is the most efficient method because it groups items by location and can batch multiple orders together.
From your marketplace dashboard: Open Shopee Seller Centre or Lazada Seller Center, view pending orders, and note the items needed. This works for low-volume sellers but becomes unwieldy above 30 orders per day.
Manually: Write or print a list from your order notifications. Functional but slow and error-prone.
However you generate the list, print it. A physical pick list in hand is faster than scrolling through a phone screen while walking through your storage area. Include the product name, SKU, quantity, and storage location on each line.
Step 3: Pick Orders — Single or Batch
You have two picking approaches, and the right one depends on your daily volume.
Single-order picking: Pick all items for one order, deliver them to the packing station, then return for the next order. Simple, no sorting needed at packing. Best for sellers processing fewer than 30 orders per day.
Batch picking: Collect items for 10-20 orders in a single trip through your storage area. You carry a cart or tray and pick everything on the consolidated list at once, then sort items by order at the packing station. More efficient for 30+ orders per day because you eliminate redundant trips to the same shelf.
The crossover point is around 30 orders daily. Below that, single-order picking is faster because sorting at the packing station takes longer than the walking time saved. Above 30, batch picking saves 30-50% of total pick time based on standard warehouse operations benchmarks.
Step 4: Set Up a Packing Station
Your packing station is where picked items become sealed packages. A good packing station keeps everything within arm’s reach so the packer never has to walk away to find materials.
Essential packing station layout:
- Work surface: A table or counter at standing or comfortable sitting height (90-100cm for standing, 70-75cm for sitting)
- Packing materials: Polymailers, boxes (2-3 sizes), bubble wrap, kraft paper for void fill, foam sheets for fragile items
- Tools: Tape dispenser (heavy-duty, not the small clear tape kind), scissors, box cutter, thermal label printer
- Labels and inserts: Pre-printed shipping labels (or a connected thermal printer), thank-you cards, return policy cards if applicable
- Verification area: A clear space where the picker places items and the packer checks them against the order before sealing
Buy packing materials in bulk. In Manila, Divisoria has the best prices for polymailers, boxes, and bubble wrap. Online, Shopee and Lazada have packaging suppliers that sell in bulk quantities. Standard pricing: polymailers PHP 2-5 each, small corrugated boxes PHP 8-15 each, bubble wrap rolls PHP 200-400 per roll.
Step 5: Verify, Pack, and Label
This step has a strict sequence. Skipping any part leads to wrong shipments or damaged products.
Verify the pick. Compare the items on the table against the order details. Check product name, variant (size, color), and quantity. This 15-second check prevents wrong-item shipments that cost PHP 200+ each to fix (return shipping plus reshipping).
Wrap the product. Fragile items get bubble wrap. Clothing gets folded into polymailers. Electronics get foam padding. Never pack a product without protection — courier handling in the Philippines involves multiple transfers, and packages get stacked, dropped, and squeezed.
Choose the right package size. Oversized boxes waste money on dimensional weight charges and allow products to shift during transit. Undersized packages get crushed. Match the box or polymailer to the product. Standard ecommerce shipping uses 3 package sizes to cover 90% of orders.
Seal and label. Tape all box seams with packing tape (not masking tape, which peels in humidity). Attach the shipping label flat on the largest face of the package. Ensure the barcode is unobstructed and scannable.
Sort for courier pickup. Group sealed packages by courier (J&T Express, Ninja Van, Flash Express) or by marketplace if using marketplace-arranged shipping. Stage them near the door for pickup.
Pro Tips
Use a barcode scanner for verification. A basic USB barcode scanner costs PHP 1,500-3,000 and eliminates wrong-item picks. Scan the product barcode, compare it against the order, and proceed only on a match. This cuts picking errors by 90% based on standard warehouse operations data.
Pre-fold polymailers before your shift. If you ship 50+ orders per day in polymailers, pre-fold and stack them by size at the start of each packing session. This saves 2-3 seconds per package, which adds up to 10+ minutes over a full day.
Print labels in batches, not one at a time. Process all pending orders at once, print all labels, then pick and pack. Switching between your laptop, printer, and packing table for each individual order destroys flow.
Keep a returns bin at the packing station. When a product looks damaged, has the wrong label, or seems like the wrong variant during verification, drop it in the returns bin immediately. Do not pack it and hope the customer will not notice.
The next section covers where most sellers make mistakes in their pick and pack process — and tip number one above is the fix for the most expensive one.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Skipping verification before sealing. The single most costly mistake in ecommerce fulfillment. Every wrong-item shipment costs you the return shipping (PHP 85-150), the correct item’s reshipping (PHP 85-150), and often a negative review that takes months to recover from. The 15-second visual check at the packing station is the cheapest quality control in your entire operation.
Using one box size for everything. A seller who ships phone cases in the same box as laptop stands pays too much for the small items (dimensional weight charges) and risks damage to the large items (not enough padding). Stock 2-3 box sizes and 2 polymailer sizes to cover your range. The material cost increase is marginal compared to the shipping savings.
Packing during peak marketplace hours. If you are packing orders at 11 AM while new Shopee orders are flooding in, you are constantly interrupting your workflow to check notifications. Set fixed packing windows — for example, 9-11 AM and 2-4 PM — and process orders in batches. For a broader look at structuring fulfillment operations, see our guide to ecommerce fulfillment and 3PL.
Not training helpers on the process. When you bring in a friend or temporary worker during campaign sales, they need to follow the same verification-pack-label sequence. Write the process on a single laminated sheet and post it at the packing station. Five minutes of training prevents hours of fixing wrong shipments.
Next Steps
Right now, you might be packing orders between checking marketplace notifications, grabbing bubble wrap from across the room, and wondering if you put the right phone case in that last package. A week from now, you could have a structured station, a printed pick list in hand, and a process that runs the same whether you pack 20 orders or 200.
Start with Step 1 — organize your storage and label every shelf. That single change makes every subsequent step faster. If you are processing 50+ orders per day and spending more time packing than growing your business, our guide to choosing a 3PL in the Philippines covers when and how to outsource fulfillment. For sellers whose bottleneck is tracking stock across channels rather than physical packing, the inventory management software comparison covers the tools that keep your stock counts accurate while you focus on fulfillment.