At a glance
Average label cost per Shippo-printed shipment, in merchant currency. The “what does each parcel cost me?” headline number, computed across every label purchased through Shippo regardless of carrier or service level.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Shippo 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 US DTC apparel brand on Shopify, ~3,000 shipments per month via Shippo. Mix: 65% USPS Priority Mail, 20% USPS Ground Advantage, 12% UPS Ground (parcels over 5 lb), 3% USPS First-Class International. Commercial Plus pricing in effect. Reading taken at 09:00 ET on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days.
The card reads **7.65. The +4.6% delta is below the +10% alert threshold; not tripped. Five things to notice:
- The Commercial Plus discount is baked in. The same 1,950 USPS Priority Mail parcels at retail rates would cost approximately 7,400 per month on USPS Priority alone by using Shippo. This saving does not appear as a “discount” line; it shows as a lower
rate.amount. - Don’t compare $8.00 to a competitor’s quoted retail rate. A merchant moving from PayPal Shipping (retail USPS) to Shippo will see this card drop ~30 to 40% on the same shipment mix without doing anything else. That is the migration savings, not an operational improvement.
- UPS Ground at $13.50 is roughly double USPS. For parcels under 5 lb that fit USPS Priority dimensions, USPS is almost always cheaper. UPS Ground earns its place on heavier parcels (over 5 lb) where USPS surcharges climb steeply, or on parcels going to addresses USPS Ground Advantage cannot promise within five days.
- The 4.6% climb may be carrier rate-card drift. USPS rate cards typically rise once or twice a year (most recent: January 2026). Compare against Cost Trend to confirm a step-change vs gradual creep.
- Insurance and weight chargebacks are excluded. True landed cost per parcel for this brand is closer to 0.30 average per parcel) and dim-weight chargebacks ($0.20 average per parcel) are added. Pair with Cost Outliers to see the chargebacks separately.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Average cost is a finance-side card. Pair it with these to act on it:Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Shippo’s own dashboard: Shippo App → Reports → Shipping Spend. The closest like-for-like view is All Carriers, Last 30 Days, Average per Shipment. Shippo also exposes the underlying invoice at Billing → Invoices, where adjustments and chargebacks appear that this card does not reflect. Why our number may legitimately differ from Shippo’s report:
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why does Shippo’s quoted “Commercial Plus discount” differ from what I see in the card? The card already shows post-discount cost. Shippo’s marketing pages quote the discount percentage against USPS retail rates (“save up to 90% on USPS”); the card shows the resulting label cost. Both are correct; they describe different ends of the same calculation. To see the savings explicitly, multiply each USPS Priority parcel’srate.amount by 1.5 to 1.8 to estimate retail cost, then subtract.
My UPS Ground rates seem expensive vs the Shippo marketing page. What is happening?
Two likely causes. (1) Plan tier. Shippo’s free / starter plan does not include negotiated UPS / FedEx rates; you pay near-retail. The Pro plan ($19/month at time of writing) unlocks negotiated rates. (2) Account binding. If you connected a UPS account to Shippo, Shippo bills your UPS account at your contract rate, not Shippo’s negotiated rate. To get Shippo’s rate, disconnect your UPS account and let Shippo route through its bundled UPS rate-card.
The card jumped 12% last month and tripped the alert. How do I diagnose?
Three checks, in order:
- Service-mix shift. Did UPS / FedEx volume rise? Check Shipments by Service. A mix-shift toward heavier / longer services moves the average.
- Carrier rate-card change. USPS publishes annual changes (typically late January). UPS / FedEx publish “general rate increases” each January and mid-year peak surcharges in October-December. Search “USPS rate change [year]” or “UPS general rate increase”.
- Dim-weight rule shift. UPS and FedEx tightened their dim-weight divisors in recent years. Parcels that previously rated by actual weight now rate by dimensional weight, costing more. Look at Cost Outliers for parcels suddenly above their historical average.
POST /insurance/policies endpoint and aggregate.
Q4 / BFCM, the cost climbs. Surcharge or mix-shift?
Both, in different proportions per merchant. UPS and FedEx publish “peak surcharges” of 7.50 per parcel from late October through mid-January. USPS does not have a peak surcharge. If your mix is USPS-dominant, Q4 cost climbs by maybe 2 to 4%; if you use UPS / FedEx for a third of volume, Q4 climbs 8 to 15%. The alert often fires for legitimate seasonal reasons; raise the threshold to +15% for the season.
Should I optimise rate-shopping in checkout to reduce this number?
Yes, with care. Shippo’s rate-shopping API (POST /shipments with BESTVALUE flag) returns the cheapest rate that meets a transit-time constraint. Two cautions: (1) the cheapest rate is sometimes USPS Ground Advantage with five-day windows that hurt OTD; trade-off applies. (2) Hard-coded checkout rules (“everything under 1 lb goes USPS Priority”) often outperform per-shipment rate-shopping if your mix is uniform.
My average is much higher than my competitor’s. Why?
Five legitimate reasons before suspecting a problem: (1) heavier average parcel weight, (2) longer average zone (DTC selling nationally vs locally), (3) more residential addresses (residential surcharge 5 per UPS / FedEx parcel), (4) more dimensional-weight-sensitive items (large light parcels), (5) plan tier (free vs Pro). Compare on like-for-like before assuming a procurement gap.
Why is the card not multi-currency-aware?
Shippo accounts are single-currency at the account level; multi-currency setups are rare. The card produces a meaningless arithmetic mean for the rare multi-currency case. Until a currency-filtered view ships, multi-currency operators should filter to one currency at a time.
Can I see the post-adjustment landed cost?
Not in this card. Look at Cost Outliers for individual chargebacks, or pull the Shippo invoice detail at Billing → Invoices. A “true landed cost per parcel” card is on the roadmap.