It can sometimes be easy to treat shelving and pallet racking as largely interchangeable concepts; both are made to stack and store large quantities of goods, so therefore they can be seen largely as differing aspects of the same idea.

Whilst this is not entirely untrue, particularly with heavy-duty shelving which is also primarily managed by forklift trucks, the two concepts are sufficiently different that choosing the right storage solution becomes essential for an optimised storeroom or warehouse.

The fundamental difference is how they are expected to be used; most shelving systems are designed to store a wide range of different items that are manually loaded and unloaded, whilst rack shelving typically stores palletised goods loaded and unloaded via forklift truck.

Because of this racking tends to have heavier weight capacities and allow goods to be stacked far higher. In both cases, this is playing to the strengths of reach trucks that have the ability to reach goods loaded that high.

Meanwhile, shelving is typically designed for mixed uses. Whilst in some cases it can be used to store palletised goods or be loaded and unloaded by machine, it is typically made to be smaller and more accessible by hand, designed to store smaller goods or bins of even smaller objects.

Often the difference between a stockroom and a warehouse is that the former tends to use shelving units whilst the latter uses racking.

Stockrooms tend to require smaller numbers of specific goods to be loaded or unloaded as and when they are needed, whilst warehouses tend to operate as part of the larger containerised supply chain. Once a pallet has been loaded, it may remain on the rack for a while until it is systematically processed.

Shelving can be adjusted more readily to meet the requirements of a particular stockroom, whilst both the needs and the racking tend to remain relatively static