What We’ve Learned: Sortation Best Practices in E-Commerce

This is the last in a four-part blog series covering best practices in areas of e-commerce. You can find the third blog here. 

Handling e-commerce is becoming more and more important to the material handling sector. The range of products and quick consumer demand has made it essential for solutions to be able to maximize space, handle both cartons and bags, and reduce the costs associated with shipping. A large part of this comes in with sortation. It’s always important to be able to sort products quickly and accurately, but there are special considerations that come with an e-commerce solution.

Use a shorter pitch

Sliding shoe sorters are an industry standard in parcel sortation. Best practices indicate utilizing a shorter pitch on slats. This allows for more throughput, so companies can run operations at a lower speed to maintain product control or have item rates of up to 200 cartons per minute.

Consider a dual-sided solution

A dual-sided solution also allows businesses to maximize space. When considering the locations a distribution center must ship to, a dual-sided solution may be the most efficient way to sort product to more locations—with the possibility of shipping to up to twice as many destinations in the same space.

Hytrol offerings

The shorter pitch and dual-sided solution are features of Hytrol’s ProSort 100 Elite. The shorter pitch on the ProSort 100 Elite shoes allows for maximizing the number of cartons that can be sorted by reducing the required minimum spacing between cartons. The dual-sided option allows for potentially doubling the number of diverts without having to extend the length of the sorter. A dual-sided sorter also allows for different shipping methods such as fluid-loading trailers on one side while diverting flats or polybags to gaylords on the other side.

While e-commerce solutions are big, it’s important not to disregard your other operations. Make sure your material handling solution is equipped to handle all of your needs, including your in-store products.

Learn more about best practices in the e-commerce boom. Download the free whitepaper.