packaging leftovers and to promote use of recycled and recyclable packaging. They discouraged their sellers from using bubble wrap and clamshell wrapping.

Clamshell wrapping is designed to to look good in store displays and to prevent item theft from its packaging. While this is all true, shell packaging often requires power tools to set the product free from its secure shell!

Introduction of frustration-free-packaging lead to an almost three-quarter drop in customer complains. It also led to a few dissatisfied clients due to their items arriving dead such as some cases with hard drives packed loosely in large shipping boxes. Nevertheless, the benefits of user-friendly packaging outweigh the disadvantages. Amazon even posted a video showing a customer taking ten minutes to unwrap a traditionally packed item versus 45 seconds for a purchase in frustration-free-packaging.





The moral of the story is that the idea is great for most purchases and has to be implemented carefully for certain items.

Phillips had a similar issue with one of their battery-operated toothbrushes. It turned out that the customers were damaging the device when getting it out of the shell in many of the reported cases. The company has seen some challenges and complexity from the fact that there should be two kinds of packaging - one for store retail and one for online retail.

Walmart and Target were also in similar situations trying to move towards an easier solution. On another green-initiative note, eBay recently announced the manufacturing of 100 thousand green reusable large shipping boxes.

The green pizza box by Ecoincorporated splits the box into four serving trays and a smaller box to pack the leftovers. These examples show that it is only a question of time before designers come up with something more usable and worry-free when unpacking your newly ordered USB thumb-drive.