Racks, shelves, carts – spend any amount of time in a warehouse and you’re bound to see any number of methods for storing, transporting, and retrieving product.

Warehouse storage bins are a versatile form of storage for products that tends to go a little overlooked in many cases. Traditional warehouses tend to keep their products grouped together in bulk storage like pallet racking without concern for individual items, but as more and more warehouses move towards serving third-party logistics with faster turnaround times, these warehouses have turned to storage bins to solve a number of item-picking challenges.

Storage bins are particularly useful in warehouses that deal in a wide degree of items, all with varying popularity. In cases like this, a lot of warehouses have started to use stackable storage bins on lower, easy-to-access shelves to store the most popular items that get picked most often. For ecommerce businesses that need to get products out the door as fast as possible, particularly in this modern age of expedited shipping and widespread regional distribution, these bins can go a long way towards cutting down on picking time, reducing the risk of mispicks or errors in item counts, and getting your goods in the waiting hands of your customers faster than ever before.

Above and beyond picking benefits, storage bins can also help reduce clutter and help stay organized. Warehouses that manufacture and/or store small individual parts can use bins to help store these items in an easy-to-access fashion that keeps them safely out of the way of larger goods and prevent clutter on your shelves.

These bins can also prevent the need for complicated tracking systems. Since most storage bins are color-coded, you can use that as part of your organizational system – certain parts can go in red bins, other smaller items in yellow bins, and so on. You’ll still want to adhere to your standard barcoding system to ensure consistency in tracking, but it will be much faster to tell your team a certain item is in “the red bins” than to give the usual alphanumeric code.

If any of these sound like a need your warehouse has encountered, then it might just be time for you to invest in some plastic warehouse storage bins.