Bought the wrong crates six months ago and I'm trying not to repeat the same mistake

[jasonroy]

The purchase seemed straightforward at the time because I just searched for heavy duty plastic crates, picked something with good reviews and ordered a significant quantity without really thinking through how they'd interact with our specific workflow and now I have a storage room full of containers that technically work but create friction at almost every point in the process because they were designed for a different use case than ours. The stacking configuration doesn't play well with our shelf heights, the footprint when empty is larger than I anticipated and loading them efficiently requires a technique that newer staff take a while to figure out which slows down the whole pick and pack process more than I'd like. I've been looking for tips for choosing practical storage crates before I make any new purchases because I want to understand the decision framework properly this time rather than just going on specs and price alone. An article on uaeautomotive.com that broke down the difference between stackable and nestable designs was genuinely the most useful thing I read because it reframed the question from which crate is better in general to which crate is better for specific operational priorities and that distinction is exactly what I was missing the first time around. What I now understand is that the empty return journey and the storage footprint when not in use should carry as much weight in the decision as the loaded performance does and that's a consideration I completely overlooked before, so if anyone here has been through a similar rethink I'd really appreciate knowing which questions you wished you'd asked before committing to a particular system.