At a glance
Mean carriage charge per parcel paid to Evri in the period. Includes base carriage, fuel surcharge, residential uplift (rare on Evri vs Royal Mail), Saturday uplift, and weight-band reclassification. Excludes claims-handling fees, optional insurance uplifts, and account-level rebates which appear on the monthly invoice rather than per-parcel. Evri is the cost-leader in the UK courier market; the card is most useful for tracking creep relative to the carrier’s positioning.
| What it counts | SUM(parcel_invoiced_amount) / COUNT(parcels_with_invoice) over the rolling 30-day window. |
| API endpoint | Evri’s billing extract / weekly invoice CSV. Reads invoiced rather than quoted amounts. |
| What is included | Base carriage, fuel surcharge (variable monthly), residential uplift, Saturday uplift, AM-cutoff uplift on Next Day services, weight-band reclassification when actual weight exceeds declared. |
| What is excluded | Claims-handling fees, third-party insurance, account-level rebates, RTS-handling charges (separate line). Card shows pre-rebate gross. |
| Currency | GBP. Display follows merchant’s store currency. |
| Service mix sensitivity | Less mix-sensitive than APC because Evri’s price spread across services is smaller (~£1 to £2 between Standard and Next Day). |
| Returns / RTO | RTS handling charges are excluded; tracked separately. |
| Time zone | UK local. |
| Time window | 30D vsP (rolling 30 vs prior 30). vsP comparison is the action signal. |
| Alert trigger | +10% vsP. Evri publishes annual rate cards each spring; a 4 to 7 percent rise in the post-rate-card month is normal. |
| Roles | owner, finance, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Evri (formerly Hermes UK) 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 DTC clothing brand running Evri Standard for 14,000 parcels per month, weight band typical 0.5kg to 1.5kg. Reading taken at 09:00 BST on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (10 Feb 26 to 11 Mar 26), comparison vs prior 30 days (11 Jan 26 to 09 Feb 26).| Service mix | Parcels | Avg charge | Total spend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evri Standard 0-1kg | 11,200 | £2.05 | £22,960 |
| Evri Next Day 0-1kg | 1,840 | £3.75 | £6,900 |
| Evri ParcelShop 0-1kg | 720 | £1.85 | £1,332 |
| Evri Standard 1-2kg (re-banded) | 240 | £2.85 | £684 |
| All Evri (this card) | 14,000 | £2.21 | £31,876 |
+10% vsP is not tripped. Five things to notice:
- The 5.2 percent rise breaks down to roughly 2 points fuel-surcharge revision and 3 points weight-band reclassification. Evri reweighs at depot and reclassifies under-declared parcels; a wave of re-weighs on a recent product launch (heavier-than-quoted units) lifts the average. Spot-check 20 re-weighed parcels: if the same product line appears, fix the dispatch system’s default weight.
- The £2.21 average is the merchant’s competitive-edge metric. Evri’s published list price for similar parcels is £2.50 to £3.00; the merchant has volume-based discounts that pull the average down. Compare to peer merchants of similar volume; if the rate is above £2.50, the contract needs renegotiation.
- Pair with On-Time Delivery Rate. A rising shipping cost without a corresponding OTD improvement is the worst trade-off direction. If cost has gone up and OTD has stayed flat, the merchant is paying more for the same reliability gap.
- Evri Next Day at £3.75 is roughly 80 percent more expensive than Standard but underperforms Royal Mail Tracked 24 at £4.50 for similar OTD. For genuine next-day reliability the better choice is Royal Mail Tracked 24, not Evri Next Day. The 1,840 monthly Next Day parcels here are worth re-evaluating.
- The annual rate-card cycle. Evri publishes new pricing each April; expect a 4 to 7 percent increase in the post-rate-card month. The merchant’s contract may have negotiated rate-locks; check before treating an April rise as out-of-pattern.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Avg shipping cost is one of three carrier-economics pillars. Pair with these:| Card | Why pair it | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Per Shipment Trend | The 90-day sparkline. | Confirms whether the 30-day move is mix or pricing. |
| Cost by Zone | Geographic breakdown. | Highlands and offshore parcels carry zone uplift. |
| High-Cost Shipment Outliers | Top-1-percent outliers. | A handful of weight-reband cases can drag the mean. |
| Shipments by Service | Service-mix breakdown. | Mix shifts often explain rises. |
| On-Time Delivery Rate | The other half of the carrier-value equation. | Cost without OTD context is meaningless. |
Cross-connector: royal_mail.roy_avg_shipping_cost | Direct UK carrier peer. | The Evri-vs-Royal-Mail unit cost gap is the core trade-off measurement. |
Cross-connector: shopify.aov | Shipping cost as fraction of AOV. | An Evri £2.21 / parcel on £25 AOV is healthy 8.8 percent of order. |
Cross-connector: shopify.gross_margin | Margin pressure. | A 5 percent shipping-cost rise compresses gross margin by ~0.3 to 0.5 points at typical AOV. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Evri’s own portal: Evri Business Portal → Billing → Invoice Register. Pull the most recent invoice CSV (typically weekly), divide total invoiced by total parcels. Why our number may legitimately differ from Evri’s invoice total:| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Rebate timing | Ours higher | Volume rebates land as a single credit on the monthly invoice; card shows pre-rebate gross. |
| Weight-reclassification lag | Ours lower for “today” | Re-weighs land 7-14 days after collection. |
| VAT | Either | Card shows ex-VAT; Evri’s invoice may include 20 percent VAT for some B2C use cases. |
| RTS-handling charges | Ours lower | RTS fees on a separate invoice line. |
| Insurance uplift | Ours lower | Insurance on a separate line. |
her_avg_shipping_cost × her_shipments_total ≈ total monthly carriage spend ex-VAT, ex-rebate, ex-RTS.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
| Card | Expected relationship | Causes of legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
shopify.shipping_revenue | Customer-side. Shipping revenue collected at checkout vs Evri carriage cost. | Free-shipping promotions, multi-carrier books. |
shopify.gross_margin | Indirect downstream. | Many margin drivers; carrier cost is one. |
Documentation cross-reference (UK carrier peers).