At a glance
Mean carriage cost per DPDLocal consignment in the period. The headline shipping-economics number for finance and the “is my courier mix optimised” check for operations. Currency is GBP for UK and EU consignments, sterling-denominated regardless of destination.
| What it counts | SUM(consignment.totalCost) / COUNT(consignments). totalCost is the contracted base rate plus surcharges (fuel, residential, remote-area, weekend, oversize, customs handling for EU). |
| Surcharges included | Fuel surcharge (re-priced monthly), residential surcharge, remote-area surcharge (Highlands and Islands postcodes IV, KW, ZE, HS, BT, IM, GY, JE), Sunday premium, EU customs-handling fee, oversize-parcel surcharge. |
| Surcharges excluded | Insurance fees (where applicable), dispute / claims-related charges, late-collection charges (these surface separately on monthly billing). |
| Returns / RTO | RTO carriage costs (the return-leg shipping fee) count if DPD is performing the return; this typically adds the standard rate to the failed parcel. |
| Currency | GBP. EU consignments are billed in GBP at the contract rate plus customs handling; the card displays GBP. |
| Time window | 30D vsP (rolling 30 days vs prior 30 days) |
| Alert trigger | +10% vsP. A 10% month-over-month rise typically signals one of three things: contract re-pricing, a fuel surcharge step-up, or a service-mix shift toward premium tiers. |
| Roles | owner, finance, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your DPDLocal 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 fitness-supplements DTC, ~10,000 DPDLocal NextDay parcels per month. Reading taken 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days.| Service | Volume | Total cost | Avg cost / parcel |
|---|---|---|---|
| NextDay (mainland UK) | 8,200 | £33,620 | £4.10 |
| NextDay Highlands surcharge | 410 | £2,460 | £6.00 |
| Predict | 950 | £5,225 | £5.50 |
| Sunday | 240 | £1,560 | £6.50 |
| EU (DDP, customs handled) | 200 | £2,400 | £12.00 |
| Aggregate | 10,000 | £45,265 | £4.53 |
+10% alert threshold. Three things to notice:
- Service mix moved toward premium. Predict share grew from 6% to 9.5% as the merchant’s marketing started promoting the named-driver experience; this lifts the average even though every individual rate is unchanged. Pair with Service Distribution.
- Fuel surcharge re-priced on 1 Mar 26. DPDLocal fuel surcharges step monthly; a 1.2 percentage-point step contributed ~£0.07 to the average across all services.
- EU at £12 per parcel is structurally expensive. Post-Brexit customs handling is a fixed fee; even if the merchant grows EU volume to 5%, the average will move up. Finance should track UK-only and EU separately for steady-state cost-per-order analysis.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Avg Shipping Cost |
|---|---|
| Cost Per Shipment Trend | 90-day shape; spots step changes from contract re-pricing or fuel-surcharge changes. |
| Cost by Service Code | Splits by NextDay / Predict / Sunday / EU. Identifies mix shifts. |
| Premium-Service Uplift vs Standard | Marginal cost of paying premium tiers vs NextDay baseline. Justifies (or doesn’t) the OTD lift. |
| Cost by Zone | Splits by UK postcode area; Highlands and EU drag. |
| On-Time Delivery Rate | Cost-vs-quality trade-off; cheap and on-time is the goal. Cost rising with OTD healthy = paying for premium that isn’t earning its keep. |
Cross-connector: shopify.shipping_revenue | Recovery rate; the card on the cost side, Shopify on the customer-paid side. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in MyDPD: MyDPD Business Portal → Billing → Invoices. The monthly invoice CSV includes per-consignmentchargeBase, surcharges, and chargeTotal. The closest like-for-like is the Sum(chargeTotal) / Count(consignments) calculation over the same date range.
Why our number may legitimately differ from MyDPD:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Volume discount accruals | Ours typically higher | DPDLocal applies retro volume discounts (per-quarter or per-year credits) at month-end on the invoice; the API per-shipment rate does not show the discount until the credit memo is issued. |
| Re-billing corrections | Either | Manual re-bills (e.g. a consignment incorrectly weight-billed at depot) flow through as separate adjustment lines; the card may not reflect a re-bill until the API surfaces the corrected chargeTotal. |
| Time zone | Boundary days | UTC vs UK local. |
| Failed-collection no-charge | Card includes 0 | Some failed-collection consignments are not billed by DPDLocal at all; the card includes them with chargeTotal = 0 which pulls the average down. |
| Card | Expected relationship |
|---|---|
| Customer-paid shipping (commerce sibling order data) | Recovery ratio = customer-paid / DPD-cost. Ratio < 1 means the merchant is subsidising shipping; ratio > 1 means shipping is a profit centre. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is my average up 8% this month with no contract change? Three usual causes in order. (1) Fuel surcharge re-priced. DPD fuel surcharges step monthly; published on the DPD website. A 1 to 2 percentage-point step lifts the average ~£0.08 to £0.16. (2) Service-mix shift. More Predict, more Sunday, more EU = higher average even with unchanged rates. (3) Highland and Islands creep. A Scottish marketing campaign brings in a higher share of remote-area surcharges. Why is the EU average so much higher than UK? EU consignments include a customs-handling fee per parcel (~£3 to £5 standard) on top of the carriage charge. Volume discounts on EU lanes are also typically smaller because EU is a smaller share of DPDLocal’s overall network. Pin a UK-only panel for steady-state cost trend and an EU-only panel for the post-Brexit lane. Should I be worried if average drops? Sometimes. Two suspicious patterns. (1) Volume credit retro applied to wrong period, the average drops while underlying rates haven’t changed; cross-check against the invoice. (2) Service-mix moved cheap: customers downgrading from Predict to NextDay because they no longer trust the slot. Pair with Predict Slot Accuracy. How do I lower this average? Five practical levers in order of typical lift. (1) Volume negotiation at next contract review; volume discount tiers reset every 12 to 18 months. (2) Right-sizing service mix, every Predict that didn’t strictly need a 30-min slot is overspend. (3) Address-data quality to cut Highland-surcharge mistypes (postcodes that look mainland but route through Highland depots). (4) Packaging optimisation to drop oversize-parcel surcharges. (5) Carrier diversification for the 5 to 10% of orders where DPDLocal is structurally expensive (e.g. EU); evaluate Royal Mail Tracked 48 for low-value EU under £100. Does the card include the fuel surcharge? Yes.totalCost in DPDLocal’s API includes fuel surcharge already; no separate breakout in this card. For a fuel-surcharge-stripped view (rate-card-only), you would need a custom field-mapper that subtracts the published fuel percentage; available in the connector roadmap.
Why does my finance team’s number from the invoice not match?
Three reasons. (1) Volume credit retro, invoice has retros, API does not. (2) Date boundary, invoice month is calendar; this card is rolling 30 days. (3) Adjustments, manual rebills land on the invoice but only flow through to the API once corrected.