Notes from the part of e-commerce nobody photographs.
Packaging maths, rule sets, customs fields and return reasons. The unglamorous decisions that decide what shipping actually costs you.
Why your parcels cost more than the rate card says
Carriers bill on the space a parcel occupies, not what it weighs. Most shops discover this one invoice at a time.
Read the guideThe shipping decisions you are making twice a day
Most manual shipping work is one decision, repeated. Writing it down once is the entire trick.
The delivery date is a promise, so treat it like one
Checkout estimates are usually a static guess. That guess is doing more conversion damage than the shipping price.
Returns are a process, not an apology
The average return is handled by a person reading an email. It does not have to be.
One carrier is a single point of failure
The advice to pick one carrier and negotiate hard made sense when integrating a second one was a project.
Parcels are not held at the border. They are held by the paperwork
Cross-border shipments fail for boring, preventable reasons, almost all of them decided before dispatch.
6 guides, written for this concept rather than reproduced from zineps.com.
Reading about it is the cheap part.
The free plan covers 200 shipments a month, with partner rates and no per-label fee.