What Is Dunnage? Protecting Products During Shipping

Dunnage is the unglamorous part of fulfillment that quietly decides whether your customer opens a perfect box or a damaged one. It is the material packed around your product inside the carton, the void fill, the cushioning, the dividers, and the bracing that keeps everything from bouncing around between Lenexa and your buyer in Brooklyn. Get it right and damage rates stay near zero. Get it wrong and you pay for it in refunds, replacements, and bad reviews.

A Simple Definition

Dunnage is any material used to support, protect, secure, or cushion goods during shipment. The word comes from the maritime industry, where bracing was used to keep cargo from shifting in the hold of a ship. In modern ecommerce fulfillment it covers everything from a sheet of kraft paper crumpled in the top of a poly mailer to engineered foam inserts cut to fit a specific product.

The Common Types of Dunnage

Most parcel shipments use one of six dunnage formats. Each has a sweet spot, and choosing the wrong one is usually what drives high damage rates.

• Kraft paper. Cheap, recyclable, and surprisingly effective for filling small voids around lightweight items. The default for most ecommerce orders under two pounds.
• Air pillows. Fast to dispense and lightweight, which keeps DIM weight down. Good for filling large empty spaces around items that do not need real cushioning, less effective for heavy or fragile goods.
• Bubble wrap. The classic choice for fragile items. The bubble size matters more than people realize: small bubbles for small items, large bubbles for surface protection on bigger goods.
• Foam-in-place. A two-part foam that expands inside the box to form a custom cushion. Excellent for high-value or oddly shaped items, but slow to dispense and harder for customers to recycle.
• Corrugated inserts and dividers. Pre-cut cardboard pieces that hold bottles, jars, or multiple SKUs apart inside one box. The right answer for multi-pack food, beverage, and supplement orders.
• Molded pulp and recycled paper trays. A sustainable alternative to foam, now common in beauty and electronics shipments where brands want a recyclable unboxing.

Why Dunnage Strategy Matters More Than People Think

Carriers handle parcels rougher than most brands realize. A box leaving our facility in Lenexa might be tossed onto a belt, dropped two feet into a cart, ride 1,200 miles on a trailer, get stacked under heavier freight, and then ride a final mile van before it reaches the customer. The right dunnage is what stands between that handling and your refund queue.

A good rule of thumb: if you shake the closed box and feel the product moving, the dunnage is wrong. Either the carton is too big, the void fill is too sparse, or the cushioning is in the wrong place. Most damage in ecommerce shipments is preventable with a 30 second packout review per SKU.

Dunnage, DIM Weight, and Cost

Dunnage is not free. Every cubic inch of kraft paper or air pillow you add increases the dimensional weight the carrier bills you for, and bulky dunnage also forces you into larger cartons that drive shipping cost even higher. The cheapest dunnage strategy is almost always the smallest properly sized box with the lightest effective cushioning. We work with brands to right-size their carton mix because shaving an inch off three sides of a box can cut shipping spend by 10 to 15 percent on light items.

Sustainability Tradeoffs

Customers increasingly care about what arrives in the box besides the product. Plastic air pillows and foam peanuts still protect goods cheaply, but a growing share of brands are paying a small premium to switch to kraft paper, molded pulp, or recyclable air pillows made from post-consumer content. The sustainability story is real, and so is the small cost increase. For brands where unboxing is part of the brand experience, the swap is almost always worth it.

How a 3PL Handles Dunnage

A good 3PL does not just throw paper in a box. We document a packout standard for every SKU, specifying the carton size, the dunnage type, the orientation of the product, and any special inserts. That standard travels with the SKU through receiving, picking, and packing so every order ships the same way regardless of which packer touched it. When a damage claim does happen, the documented packout makes root cause analysis quick and the fix permanent.

The Bottom Line

Dunnage is small detail work that compounds. Choose the right type for each SKU, size your cartons honestly, document the packout, and your damage rate drops to a fraction of a percent. Skip any of those steps and you will pay for it every month in refunds and replacements. If your damage rate is creeping up, the dunnage strategy is the first place to look.