For anyone managing an e-commerce business, the shipping cost is one of the factors that truly makes the difference between healthy margins and abandoned carts. Complex rates, surcharges that are not always clear, promises of 24-hour delivery and customers accustomed to “almost free” shipping make the topic even more delicate.
The point is not just obtaining good courier rates, but knowing how to use them intelligently, order by order. Beyond tools that compare national courier costs and international shipping rates, you need an orchestration engine like SEND2U that can automatically choose the most efficient option, integrating with Omnichannel Solutions and Tracking to provide full visibility on costs and performance.
Price variables: actual/volumetric weight, zones, SLAs and surcharges
To correctly estimate the shipping cost, you must first understand which levers carriers use to calculate the price. Behind the differences between individual contracts, there are a few constants: weight, volume, distance and service level. The actual weight is the most intuitive factor, but volumetric weight—calculated from the parcel’s dimensions and a coefficient set by the carrier—is just as important. This means that a light but very bulky parcel can cost more than a heavy but compact one. If the management system or WMS does not handle this information properly, you risk systematically underestimating costs.
The second major variable is the zone. Couriers divide the territory into tariff areas, whether for national courier costs or international ones. Certain regions, islands or remote zones have higher rates or specific surcharges. Without a clear mapping in the system, the quotes provided to the customer risk being unrealistic.
To this logic we add the SLA, meaning the service level. The same route can have a standard rate, an express rate, one with delivery on a specific day or with additional options such as cash on delivery or scheduled delivery. Finally, there are surcharges: fuel, remote areas, handling of non-standard parcels, undeliverable returns, holiday extras and other items that appear in the footnotes of contracts but make a real difference in accounting.
How to determine which carrier is the most cost-effective for each order
The question “which carrier is the most cost-effective?” never has an absolute answer. A carrier may be the cheapest for a certain weight range, specific destinations or a particular mix of services, but become less competitive in other combinations. The real goal is not to choose a single winner, but to understand which carrier is most efficient for each specific order based on weight, dimensions, postcode, country and the SLA required by the customer.
Traditionally, the courier rate comparison is a useful but static exercise. When courier rates change, applying these logics on a daily basis is anything but automatic. The person entering the order in the management system or WMS risks selecting the “default” courier, not the most cost-effective one for that specific case. A more advanced approach involves feeding the courier rates into a rules engine, directly connected to orders and customer master data through a smart delivery service. This way, every time an order enters the system, the relevant variables are automatically read and compared with the available contracts. If the order is light but bulky, headed to a remote zone with a certain SLA, the system can choose the carrier that offers the best balance between price, delivery time and historical performance.
This is where SEND2U by Hubrise comes into play, which receives information from the e-commerce ecosystem, reads weight, volume, destination and service-level data, and applies rules that incorporate the courier rate comparison in real time. It’s not just about choosing the lowest price overall, but about assessing actual cost, carrier reliability, the SLA promised to the customer and company policies, ensuring that every order travels with the most efficient option in that context.
International shipping rates
When moving from domestic shipments to international shipping rates, the complexity increases even further. In addition to the logic of actual and volumetric weight, zones and SLAs, factors such as duties, customs charges, documentation handling and possible customs-related extra costs come into play. In this context, simply comparing price lists is not enough: a carrier may appear competitive based solely on the transport rate, but become less convenient once you factor in customs clearance times, handling of duties and the rate of successful first-attempt deliveries.
International shipping rates are often structured by macro-areas (Europe, North America, rest of the world) and by zones within those areas. Here too, the key is reading the contracts together with historical data. A carrier may have seemingly higher rates on a certain route, but a higher on-time delivery rate and lower exception-handling costs. If customer care constantly has to intervene to clarify where the goods are or to unblock customs procedures, the actual shipping cost rises quickly, even if the base price list looked theoretically better.
To have a complete picture, you need to connect two dimensions: the economic one, given by the contracts and the international shipping rates, and the operational one, given by tracking, actual delivery times and the number of anomalies. The Tracking services by Hubrise collect shipment events from different carriers and link them to orders, making it possible to understand, for example, whether a certain carrier has a systematic delay rate in a specific area or weight range.
Based on this information, SEND2U can fine-tune specific rules: for certain foreign destinations, you can decide to prioritize not only the carrier that is cheaper on paper, but the one that, at the same price point, has shown better performance over time.
In an e-commerce logic, it is not only important to find the carrier with the lowest rates, but to build a portfolio of couriers, both national and international, that efficiently covers the main markets, with predictable costs and performance consistent with the promise made to the customer.
SEND2U for carrier-selection rules and end-to-end cost control
Reducing the shipping cost does not simply mean negotiating each individual contract well, but being able to apply the right rules every day, on every order, without burdening the operations team with manual decisions.
Our intelligent, multi-courier shipping service receives orders from the connected sales channels, reads product, customer, destination, weight and volume data, and compares them with the courier rates and company policies. Based on this information, it automatically selects the carrier for each shipment, dynamically deciding which option is most efficient. For a light domestic shipment, it may choose the carrier with the best national courier costs for that weight range and zone; for an international shipment with high value, it may prioritize a carrier offering more structured customs-clearance services even at a slightly higher rate, because the cost of a delay would be greater.
Thanks to Hubrise’s omnichannel solutions, the question “which carrier is the most cost-effective?” stops being an abstract discussion and becomes a concrete, automated, and measurable choice for every single order. The result is a system in which the courier rates are truly put to work by an intelligent engine, and the shipping cost becomes a lever the company can control with clear data in hand, integrating logistics and sales channels within a single technology.