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Metrics type: Cross-Platform Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier
Claim value as a fraction of DPDLocal-fulfilled revenue. >2% = the carrier is materially eroding margin; carrier-renegotiation trigger.

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At a glance

Sum of all DPDLocal claims (open and settled) divided by total revenue from orders shipped via DPDLocal. The “is the carrier eroding my margin” metric. Above 2% is the renegotiation-or-switch trigger; below 0.5% is healthy carrier hygiene.

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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.

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Worked example

A UK premium-electronics DTC merchant. Reading 12 Mar 26, trailing 90 days. Card reads 1.6%. Under the 2% trigger; healthy for premium-electronics. Three things to notice:
  1. Premium-electronics typically runs 1.2 to 2.5%, fragile high-AOV goods generate more DAMAGED claims. 1.6% is mid-range. A fashion DTC running the same number would be cause for serious concern (target <0.5%).
  2. The 1.6% is gross, not net. Of the £29,440, perhaps £18,000 will be paid out by DPD; the rest will be denied or withdrawn. Net cost to the merchant is the gap between claims filed and claims paid plus the customer-facing refunds covered out-of-pocket.
  3. Trend matters more than the level. A merchant at 1.4% rising to 1.6% to 1.8% over three reads is heading for renegotiation; a merchant steady at 1.6% for 12 months is just operating in a damage-prone category and the level is already priced into the carrier rate.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look: DPDLocal’s MyDPD shows raw claim values. The commerce sibling shows revenue. Neither produces this ratio natively. The card is the join. Why your manual calc may differ: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

What’s a “good” claim ratio for my category? Useful benchmarks. (1) Fashion / apparel: 0.2 to 0.5%. (2) Beauty / supplements: 0.3 to 0.8%. (3) Premium electronics / fragile: 1.2 to 2.5%. (4) B2B: under 0.2%. Tune the alert threshold to your category. Should I look at the open subset only or open+settled? For carrier-renegotiation conversations, use both (this card). For finance forecasting, use settled only (filters out claims DPD will deny). The card’s design reflects the carrier-renegotiation use case. The ratio jumped 0.5% in one month. What changed? Three usual causes. (1) Single high-value claim (e.g. a £4,000 lost-laptop claim) settled in the period. (2) Settlement of a backlog batch. DPD occasionally settles a quarterly batch in one go. (3) Volume drop without claim drop, denominator shrank, ratio rose. Pair with Total Orders sibling. My account team disputes the ratio. What’s their leverage? DPD’s leverage is the per-claim valuation (declared value caps) and denial reasons (insufficient packaging, etc.). The card’s leverage is the unambiguous totals. The right framing is “settled value (DPD-paid) is X% of revenue, even excluding open and denied”. DPD struggles to argue the realised-cash number. Is this card the right input for an RFP / carrier-switch decision? One of three. The other two are Carrier OTD by Sales Channel for service-level evidence and Avg Shipping Cost for headline rate. Combine all three for a balanced commercial review. Why is the window 90D and not the 30D used elsewhere? Claim resolution is slow (14 to 45 days typical). A 30-day window mostly captures filed-but-unsettled claims with high noise on the settled side. 90 days lets settlement-timing variance smooth out.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Claim Value as % of DPDLocal Revenue is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across DPDLocal and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.