At a glance
Mean carriage charge per shipment paid to APC Overnight in the period. Calculated across every consignment with an invoiced charge in the window, including base carriage, fuel surcharge, residential uplift, Saturday uplift, over-weight surcharge, and any zone-extra. Excludes optional add-ons billed outside carriage (insurance, claims-handling fees) and excludes RTS-charged consignments which are surfaced separately.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your APC Overnight data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A UK premium DTC homewares brand running APC Overnight as the time-definite carrier for high-AOV breakable items, around 1,800 consignments per month. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (10 Feb 26 to 11 Mar 26), comparison vs the prior 30 days (11 Jan 26 to 09 Feb 26).
Prior 30-day average was £9.36. The card reads £9.85, a +5.2 percent vsP move. The alert at
+10% vsP is not tripped. Five things to notice:
- The 5.2 percent rise breaks down to roughly 3 points fuel-surcharge revision and 2 points service-mix shift. APC re-published its monthly fuel surcharge on 01 Feb 26 (UK diesel pump price drives the formula); that accounts for roughly 3 points across the whole book. The remaining 2 points is a slight shift toward NextDay-12 from NextDay anytime as the brand has been promoting “by 12 noon” delivery on the PDP. Neither component is a pricing problem, both are explainable.
- The 1,640 NextDay-12 average of £9.20 is the dial. That is the unit cost of the brand’s customer promise. If it climbs above £10, the merchant should re-look at (a) the proportion of residential uplifts (charge £1.20 per parcel on B2C addresses), (b) over-weight reclassifications, and (c) zone-extras for non-mainland UK orders.
- Pallet 24 at £42.50 is the right benchmark for that lane. Pallet pricing is roughly £38 to £55 base depending on weight band and contracted rate; £42.50 is mid-band. Pallet shipments are 1.8 percent of consignments but 7.9 percent of total APC spend, which is normal for a brand that ships occasional wholesale orders.
- The vsP comparison is the actionable signal. A merchant who reads “£9.85 average” without a comparison has no action; “£9.85 up 5.2 percent” tells them to check fuel surcharge and mix. If the move had been +12 percent, the next conversation is with the APC account team.
- Compare against Royal Mail and DPD legs. The same merchant’s Royal Mail Tracked 48 leg likely runs at £3.40 to £3.80 per parcel; their DPD Predict NextDay leg around £6.50 to £7.50. APC’s £9.85 is the most expensive leg and is paid for the time-definite cutoff. Use
royal_mail.roy_avg_shipping_costanddpd.dpd_avg_shipping_costfor the side-by-side.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Avg shipping cost is one of three pillars of the carrier-economics view. Pair it with these:Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in APC’s own portal: APC Overnight Customer Portal → Billing → Invoice Register. Pull the most recent invoice CSV (typically weekly), divide total invoiced by total consignments. The result should reconcile with this card to within 1 percent. For account-managed customers, APC’s QBR slides the same figure broken down by service, by zone, and by surcharge component. Why our number may legitimately differ from APC’s invoice total:
Internal identity (within APC):
apc_avg_shipping_cost × apc_shipments_total ≈ total monthly carriage spend. The card’s avg multiplied by total shipment count should match the monthly invoice ex-VAT, ex-rebate, ex-RTS, ex-insurance.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Documentation cross-reference (for agencies running multiple UK shippers). Avg-shipping-cost metrics exist with conceptually similar definitions across other UK carriers and 3PLs. Note that absolute numbers are not directly comparable across carriers because of different service mixes and different pricing structures.