ISTA 6-Amazon Over-Boxing Testing

Over-Boxing is the ISTA 6-Amazon procedure for products that cannot ship in their own container. The retail package is placed inside an added corrugated master carton with Kraft paper dunnage around it, and the whole assembly is tested. Passing it is what earns Tier 3 Prep-Free Packaging, which tells Amazon your primary packaging is strong enough that no bagging, bubble wrap or other prep is needed before the over-box goes on.

Two different ceilings apply here, and they get confused. The ISTA procedure itself runs to 70 lb (32 kg) per item. Amazon caps its Prep-Free Packaging tier at under 50 lb (23 kg). A package between those two figures can be tested to the procedure but will not certify as PFP. The dunnage is specified by the procedure rather than left to the lab, down to the paper and how it is dispensed, because fill density changes the result. We set that up to the current revision so you do not have to think about it.

The most useful thing to know about this procedure is that the drop heights are fixed rather than weight-bracketed. Whether the item is light or near the ceiling, the severity is the same, which makes it easier to plan than SIOC.

• Two shock sequences, the second ending on a hazard impact, with a small number of the drops run at doubled height.
• Vibration across three orientations, using the over-the-road spectrum only. There is no pick-up and delivery leg in this procedure, and no top load is applied.
• A leak test where the product contains liquid.
• No compression test anywhere. Unlike much of the ISTA catalogue, this procedure has no compression step at all, standalone or dynamic. If your customer expects a compression report, it has to be added.

Acceptance is judged on the product, its tamper-evident features and its secondary retail packaging. It explicitly excludes the hazard products used as void fill, the Kraft dunnage, and the over-box itself. A scuffed outer carton is not a failure here, which is exactly the point of the tier.

More than most people budget for, and it is the question worth asking us before you plan the build. Three things drive it: whether the listing is a single item or multiple, whether the product is fragile, and which weight band it falls in. Those combine, so a fragile multi-item listing is a materially bigger job than a single non-fragile one.

There is a second driver people miss entirely. The hazard products packed alongside your item are selected by matching both the weight and the cubic volume of the test specimen, and a fragile product needs that whole selection repeated as its own set. Two jobs that look similar on a spec sheet can need very different sample counts.

Send us the packed weight, the dimensions, the listing type and whether the product is fragile, and we will confirm the exact count with the quote. Samples are untested, production-representative packages with the real product inside, and the procedure is destructive, so every unit sent is a unit consumed.

Does the product ship bare in its own retail box, or does it need an outer carton around it?

Ships bare goes to SIOC. Needs an added outer box and dunnage goes to Over-Boxing, and Over-Boxing tops out at 70 lb. If you want the top tier with recyclability and ease-of-opening criteria on top, that is Frustration-Free Packaging, which runs on the SIOC protocol rather than this one.

Who can run the test and how Amazon accepts it is covered on the APASS lab page. The overview is at Amazon package testing, the broader family at ISTA package testing, and everything under package testing services. Our full accreditations are listed separately.