Packaging quotes are often treated as a single number to be negotiated down. It is more useful to understand what the number is made of, because several of its components are under your control and one of them dwarfs the purchase price entirely.
Timber is most of it
Material dominates. For context on volatility: spruce sawn timber ran around €125–145 per m³ in 2026, having risen roughly 15% year on year, and new EPAL Euro pallets were quoted at around €21–29 in Germany over the same period.
Two consequences follow. First, packaging prices move with the timber market, and a quote held for six months is a quote with a risk premium built in. Second, volume of wood is the main lever — which is why over-specification is expensive in a way that is easy to miss.
The dimensions that cost extra are not the ones you expect
Timber arrives in standard lengths and sections. A design that divides neatly into those produces very little waste. A design that misses them by 30 mm turns the offcut into scrap, and you pay for the whole board.
This is why a slightly larger crate is sometimes cheaper than a slightly smaller one. If you have flexibility of a few centimetres, tell us the tolerance rather than a single fixed number — we can often move a dimension into a standard section and take real cost out.
The same applies to thickness. Stepping from 22 mm to 25 mm boards may be a stock item, while an unusual thickness means either planing down from thicker stock, which wastes material and adds a process, or a special order.
Design complexity
Every additional element carries labour:
- Number of distinct parts. A crate with eight component types costs more to make than one with four, even at the same material volume.
- Diagonal bracing and internal blocking. Necessary above certain heights and loads, but each cut and fix is time.
- Fastening method. Nailed is fastest, screwed is slower, bolted with countersinking and locking nuts slower still — and appropriate for very different products.
- Internal fitting. Cradles, formed supports and cut-outs to hold a specific shape are engineering, and they are priced as engineering.
None of this argues for the simplest possible design. It argues for a design that is exactly as complex as the product requires and no more, which is a conversation, not a catalogue lookup.
Treatment, moisture and marking
Heat treatment and ISPM 15 marking are a real line item, and worth two checks. First, does your route need it? Within the EU, generally not. Plenty of buyers pay for treated packaging on internal shipments out of habit. Second, if you are buying new EPAL pallets, treatment is already included — those have been heat treated as standard since 2010, so it should not appear as a separate charge.
A specified moisture content is a separate cost from treatment, because it means kiln time and controlled storage. It is worth paying for when staining or dimensional stability matters, and worth omitting when it does not.
Quantity and setup
Setup is a fixed cost spread across the batch. Ten identical crates cost far less per unit than one, and the first unit of any new design carries the drawing, jig and first-off checks.
Where this bites is repeat orders of slightly different sizes. Five batches of twenty at five different dimensions cost considerably more than one hundred identical units. If your products vary, it is often cheaper to standardise on two or three packaging sizes with some void fill than to make every crate a perfect fit.
The cost that dwarfs the quote
Here is the part most buyers under-weight: the freight consequences of your packaging dimensions will usually exceed the packaging price difference, often by a lot.
European road freight is charged by loading metre. A Euro-footprint pallet is 0.40 loading metres; an industrial pallet is 0.50. If your box overhangs the pallet by 50 mm, it no longer fits the row pattern, and you lose positions on every trailer for the life of the product.
We regularly redesign a crate 30 or 40 mm smaller so it fits the module cleanly. The packaging cost barely changes; the freight saving repeats on every shipment. When we ask what your product's dimensional tolerance is, this is why.
Where to actually save
- Give tolerances, not fixed dimensions. The single highest-value thing you can do.
- Check whether you need treatment on that route.
- Standardise sizes across products where you can.
- Order in fewer, larger batches if storage allows.
- Ask whether repair is an option for returnable packaging before replacing it.
- Do not buy strength you cannot use. A crate rated far above your load costs more and weighs more, and weight costs freight too.
If you want a quote that is genuinely comparable between suppliers, send the item's dimensions and weight, the destination, the quantity and any tolerance you have. Anything less and every supplier is quoting a slightly different product.
