Honeycomb paper for Amazon sellers: where it fits in FBA and in your own fulfilment

Yes, you can use honeycomb paper when you sell on Amazon, but not in every role. The Amazon US pages ask for a fragile unit to be bubble wrapped or boxed, so honeycomb paper belongs inside a six-sided box around the product, and as cushioning in the carton you send to the fulfilment centre. For orders you ship yourself, the material is your call, and so is the cost of anything that arrives broken.

That is the short version. The longer one matters, because the Amazon wording is precise.

A sloppy reading costs money.

We make honeycomb paper in Jaipur and export it to 20+ countries. Many of the rolls end up in boxes that go into an Amazon fulfilment centre. So I have read these pages carefully, more than once. Every rule below is taken from the Amazon help pages for the US marketplace, as they read in October 2026. Amazon changes them, so please open the current page before you change your packing.

Where can honeycomb paper go in an Amazon shipment?

Think of an FBA shipment in two layers. The unit is the product a customer buys, with its prep. The carton is the box of units you send to Amazon. The rules are different for each.

The table comes from four Amazon pages: Product packaging requirements, Fragile products, Boxing requirements and Shipping and routing requirements.

Is honeycomb paper on Amazon's approved list?

Not by name. The Amazon shipping page lists four packing materials to use: bubble wrap, full sheets of paper (it says heavy-weight kraft is best), inflatable air pillows, and polyethylene foam sheeting. It lists six it does not want. These are packing peanuts of every kind, foam strips, crinkle wrap, shredded paper, thermocol chips and Styrofoam.

Honeycomb paper is one full sheet of kraft paper with rows of slits cut into it. It is not shredded, and it is not crinkle-cut.

So I read it as sitting in the paper family, not the banned one.

But that is my reading, not Amazon's.

A seller asked exactly this question on the Amazon Seller Forums about two years ago. The Amazon moderator who replied did not give a yes or no. He said to start from whether the stock survives the trip undamaged, keep the 2 inches of cushioning, avoid the banned materials, and try a small test shipment. A forum reply is not a policy. Still, I think it is sound advice, and it is the same advice I give our own buyers.

The same seller worried that small bits of paper might come off the honeycomb. That is a fair worry, and it is about the cut, not the idea. A clean die-cut leaves no loose pieces. A worn blade leaves half-cut flaps and fibre dust. On our lines, every lot is checked for cut quality for exactly this reason. Whoever you buy from, pull a metre of the paper over a dark table and look at what falls off.

What about the "60 lb kraft paper" line?

The same shipping page says that, for best results, packing kraft paper should have a minimum basis weight of 60 lb. US basis weight is pounds per 3,000 square foot ream. One GSM is about 0.614 lb on that basis, so 60 lb is roughly 98 GSM.

Our grades run from 50 to 120 GSM. The 100 and 120 GSM grades clear that number. The everyday 80 GSM grade is about 49 lb, so it does not.

I read "for best results" as advice, not a pass mark. The pass mark Amazon actually writes down is the drop test. A lighter grade wrapped in more layers may pass it, and a heavier grade wrapped badly may fail. Test both. Our GSM to pounds chart has the full conversion.

Why honeycomb paper does not replace bubble wrap as unit prep

This is the line sellers most often get wrong.

The Amazon Bubble wrap requirements page says fragile and premium products must be wrapped in bubble wrap or a box so the item is not exposed. It asks for at least two layers, the item covered on every side, and a barcode that scans without unwrapping. It names bubble wrap and bubble bags. It does not name paper.

So a glass vase wrapped only in honeycomb paper and sent in loose is a risk. You would be relying on someone at the dock to agree that paper counts.

I would not take that bet with a full carton.

The safer method uses the boxing route instead. Put the product in a six-sided box that does not give way when pressed, hold it still inside with honeycomb paper, seal it, and put the barcode on the outside. The boxing page says the contents must be secured in place inside the box. Honeycomb paper is very good at that job, because the cells lock onto each other and onto the product.

If you already sell in a retail box, the honeycomb goes inside that box.

If you do not, this is a good reason to get one.

FBA prep is now the seller's job in the US

From 1 January 2026, Amazon stopped offering prep and item labelling services for FBA shipments in the US marketplace. Amazon announced it in its Selling Partner API changelog.

Before that date, some sellers sent fragile units in raw and paid Amazon to bubble wrap them. That option is gone. Every unit now has to arrive prepped, either by you or by a prep centre you pay.

This changes the paper question in a practical way. Someone on your side now builds every fragile unit by hand, so the wrap has to be fast to use and easy to store.

We build our standard roll for exactly that kind of bench work. It is 250 m flat on the roll, it sits on a table-top dispenser, and it opens to about 400 m of wrap as the packer pulls. Our post on FBA prep with paper packaging walks through the prep itself, step by step, with the drop test.

Orders you ship yourself: the A-to-z cost of a broken item

For FBM orders, the pages above do not apply, because they are written for stock going into Amazon warehouses. You pack the parcel your way. The rule that hurts is on the buyer side.

Under the Amazon A-to-z Guarantee, a buyer whose item arrives damaged can claim if the seller has not authorised a return within 48 hours. For a damaged item, the refund covers the product cost, the original shipping and the return shipping.

So one broken mug costs you three times over: the mug, the postage out, and the postage back.

This is where honeycomb paper does its best work. Wrap the item in enough turns to cover every face, put it in a box that fits, and fill the gaps. If the gaps are large, honeycomb wrap plus a separate void fill usually works better than more wrap. Our post on using honeycomb wrap with void fill covers that.

Which width and grade suit Amazon products?

Start from your most common product, not your biggest one. I have kept the table short on purpose. These are starting points to test, not rules.

The GSM guide explains what paper weight changes, if you want the reasoning behind each row.

A 20-minute check before your first FBA shipment

1. Open the current Amazon pages linked above for your marketplace, and note the date you read them.
2. Pack one unit exactly as you plan to: product, honeycomb paper, six-sided box, barcode outside.
3. Drop that unit five times from 3 feet onto concrete, as the Amazon fragile products page describes. Open it and look.
4. Pack one full carton with 2 inches of honeycomb cushioning between the units and the walls. Shake it. Nothing should move.
5. Pull a metre of your paper over a dark surface and check that no bits fall off.
6. Photograph the unit, the carton and the paper roll label. Keep the photos with the shipment ID.
7. Send a small first shipment before a large one.

Where honeycomb paper is the wrong choice on Amazon

I would not use it for sharp items, for products Amazon wants in a poly bag (small items, loose liquids, textiles), or where you need a moisture barrier. Paper does not replace a poly bag requirement, and a suffocation-warning bag is still a bag.

For heavy, dense items with hard corners, test very hard before you switch. Honeycomb paper cushions well, but a 10 kg cast iron pan with a sharp edge will find its way through most wraps.

Where we fit

We sell honeycomb paper by the pallet and the container, to distributors and to larger sellers who pack in volume. If you ship a few hundred orders a month, a local packaging distributor is the sensible place to buy, and many of them stock rolls like ours.

We test our own samples on a dispenser and with drops before they leave Jaipur, and I would like you to test them the same way.

If you pack enough to think in pallets, send me your products, your Amazon marketplace and roughly how many units go to FBA each month, through our contact page. We will suggest a width and grade, and send a sample you can drop-test against the Amazon rule before you spend real money.