For most small ecommerce businesses, shipping sits behind stock and staff as the third largest cost — and gets a fraction of the attention either of those receive. It is also unusually responsive to effort: a few hours spent on boxes and service mix often returns more than a month of chasing supplier discounts.
Twelve changes, roughly in order of how much they typically save.
1. Right-size your packaging
The biggest single lever. Couriers charge on volumetric weight — length × width × height ÷ 5000 — whenever that exceeds actual weight. Bulky, light parcels are therefore priced on the air inside them.
A 60 × 40 × 40cm box has a volumetric weight of 19.2kg no matter what is in it. Get the same goods into 40 × 30 × 25cm and it becomes 6kg. Same service, same protection, roughly a third of the cost.
Take your five best-selling products and measure the smallest box each genuinely fits in with adequate padding. Order those sizes. Most small businesses run two box sizes and overpay on nearly everything that is not a perfect fit for either.
2. Stock more box sizes
Two sizes means most orders ship in a box that is too big. Five or six sizes covering your real order profile costs a little more in stock and storage, and saves on nearly every parcel. Add mailing bags for soft goods, which have almost no volumetric penalty at all.
3. Stop defaulting to next day
Speed is the most expensive variable in shipping. If next day is your default, you are paying a premium on every order including the ones nobody is waiting for.
| Service | From (excl. VAT) | Use as |
|---|---|---|
| Economy, 3–5 days | £3.99 | Default for low-value and bulky goods |
| 2-Day | £5.99 | Default for most orders |
| Next Day | £8.99 | Paid upgrade at checkout |
Offering next day as a paid upgrade means the customers who value speed fund it. Tracking, insurance and photo proof of delivery are identical across all three with us, so the customer experience does not degrade — only the transit time changes.
4. Work out your true cost per order
You cannot price shipping you have not measured. The real number is:
Courier rate + VAT + box + tape + void fill + label + (replacement rate × item cost) = true cost per order
That last term is the one everybody omits. If one parcel in 200 goes missing on a £30 item, that is 15p on every order before packaging. Include it or your margin calculations are fiction.
5. Attack your failed delivery rate
Failed deliveries are pure loss: a possible redelivery charge, a support conversation, sometimes a refund. They are also mostly preventable from the label:
- Capture and pass on a mobile number and email for every recipient
- Make flat/unit number a required field, not an optional line two
- Offer a safe place option at checkout
- Validate addresses against a postcode lookup rather than trusting free text
Our guide to delayed and missing parcels covers the rest of the prevention list.
6. Consolidate multi-item orders
One 5kg parcel almost always beats three 2kg parcels. If your system splits orders by warehouse location or by product type, check whether it is splitting parcels that could travel together — and whether a short wait for a back-ordered item is cheaper than a second shipment.
7. Drop off instead of booking collections
Collections carry a cost and a waiting window. If you pass a drop-off point on a normal day, dropping off is usually cheaper and often gets the parcel into the network sooner, which improves your dispatch times as well as your costs.
8. Get volume pricing
Ad-hoc rates are retail rates. Once you ship consistently every week, a business account is normally cheaper per parcel, replaces card payments with monthly invoicing, puts every shipment on one dashboard, and gives you a named contact for when something needs chasing.
Rates are volume-based, so it is worth asking even at modest volumes — tell us your weekly numbers and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth switching yet.
9. Reduce packaging weight, not protection
Heavy void fill pushes parcels into higher weight bands. Lighter materials — paper, air pillows — in a correctly sized box protect just as well for less weight.
What does not work is cutting protection. A damage claim costs the item, the postage, the refund and often the customer. Pack properly and shrink the box instead: our packaging guide covers the standard to aim for.
10. Make returns cheap to process, not free to abuse
Returns are unavoidable in clothing and gifting. A pre-paid returns label from £2.99 plus VAT lets the customer drop off at any of 10,000+ locations without you emailing labels one at a time, and gives you tracking on the inbound leg — which matters when someone claims they returned something.
Reducing return rates is usually a product-page problem rather than a shipping one: better photographs, accurate sizing guides, and clearer dimensions.
11. Weigh and measure accurately
Guessing high wastes money on every parcel. Guessing low invites re-grading fees and delays. A set of parcel scales and a tape measure at the packing bench pays for itself quickly — and once you know each product's real shipped weight, you can put it in your system and stop guessing altogether.
12. Review your rates twice a year
Your order profile drifts. Products get heavier, average order value changes, you start selling something bulky. Rates that fitted last year's mix may be wrong for this year's. Put a recurring reminder in the calendar to re-quote your top ten shipping profiles.
What not to cut
Some savings cost more than they save:
- Tracking. Untracked postage is cheaper until your first item-not-received claim, then it is the most expensive option available.
- Proof of delivery. Photo proof is what wins marketplace disputes — see our guide for eBay and Etsy sellers.
- Insurance on valuable goods. Cover has to be declared at booking; it cannot be added after a loss.
- Adequate packaging. The saving is pennies and the failure mode is a refund.
- Reachable support. When a parcel goes wrong you need a person, not a form.
A worked example
A shop shipping 200 parcels a month, all next day, all in one oversized box size:
| Change | Effect per month |
|---|---|
| Move 70% of orders from next day to 2-day | 140 parcels × ~£3 saved |
| Right-size boxes on the top five products | Lower volumetric band on most parcels |
| Cut failed deliveries by capturing mobile numbers | Fewer redelivery charges and support hours |
| Move to volume pricing on a business account | Lower rate across all 200 |
None of those four changes touches what the customer receives. They still get tracking, a delivery photo, insurance and a parcel that arrives intact — the only difference is transit time on the orders that were never urgent.
Frequently asked questions
The cost questions small businesses ask us most are below, with more on the FAQ page.
Start with your real numbers
Put your three most common parcel profiles into the Fleet Express quote tool and compare against what you pay now. If you are shipping weekly, send us your volumes and we will quote volume pricing — and say so if you would be better off staying as you are.
