> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Cost by Zone, Shippo

> Cost by Zone for Shippo stores. Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre. How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it.

**Metrics type:** [Supporting Metrics](/nerve-centre/overview#metrics-types-explained)  •  **Category:** [Shipping & Courier](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type)

## At a glance

> Despatch spend broken down by Shippo shipping zone over the trailing 30 days. Zones group destinations by distance band (USPS Zones 1 to 9, or the carrier-equivalent banding for UPS / FedEx / DHL), so you can see where your parcel spend concentrates and which zones are quietly eroding margin.

|                    |                                                                                                                                                                                          |
| ------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **What it tracks** | Total and average label cost grouped by destination zone, sourced from the `rate.amount` charged on each Shippo `transaction` and bucketed by the carrier zone returned on the shipment. |
| **Data source**    | Shippo `GET /transactions` (paid labels) joined to `rate` and the resolved destination zone. Bar-horizontal chart, one bar per zone.                                                     |
| **Time window**    | `30D` (rolling 30 days).                                                                                                                                                                 |
| **Alert trigger**  | None. This is a diagnostic distribution card, not an alerting card.                                                                                                                      |
| **Roles**          | owner, finance                                                                                                                                                                           |

## What it tracks

Cost by Zone answers one question for despatch and finance teams: where is your shipping budget actually going? A multi-carrier merchant on Shippo rarely ships evenly across zones. Most US DTC stores see 60 to 75 percent of volume land in nearby Zones 1 to 4 (cheap, fast) and a long tail in Zones 5 to 9 (expensive, slower). This card pulls the paid label cost from each Shippo transaction, reads the destination zone the carrier assigned, and sums spend per zone band. A bar creeping up in Zone 8 usually means a new customer cluster on the far coast, a rate-table change, or a carrier-selection rule sending distant parcels to the wrong service. Pair it with [High-Cost Shipment Outliers](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shippo/high-cost-shipment-outliers) to find the individual parcels driving a heavy zone, and with [Cost Per Shipment Trend](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shippo/cost-per-shipment-trend) to see whether the blended cost is drifting over time.

## Reconciling against the source

Cross-check against the [Shippo dashboard](https://apps.goshippo.com/) under Billing and the per-transaction label cost, filtered to the same 30-day window. Shippo bills in account-local time and the card stores in UTC, so boundary days can shift a handful of labels between zones in the totals. Refunded or voided labels drop out of Shippo billing on their own cadence, so a recently voided label may still appear here until the next refresh.

***

### Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

*Cost by Zone* is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Shippo 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](https://app.vortexiq.ai/login) or [book a demo](https://www.vortexiq.ai/contact-us) to see this metric running on your own data.