When Your Postage Costs Go Up

Couriers raise their prices quietly. The first most sellers know about it is a shipping bill that does not match the figure they have been carrying in their head since spring.

Find out what it actually costs today

Before changing anything, price your three most common parcels again at current rates. Most people are working from a number they learned months ago and have never rechecked. Sometimes the gap is smaller than feared. Sometimes it is a great deal larger, and it has been coming out of your margin every week without appearing anywhere you would notice.

Decide where the extra comes from

There are only three places it can come from. You absorb it and take less, you add it to the postage you charge, or you fold it into the item price so the postage line stays where buyers expect to see it. All three are perfectly legitimate. Drifting into the first one by accident, because you never did the sum, is the one to avoid.

Change it once, not by degrees

Nudging postage up in small steps every few weeks makes your regulars notice every single time. One clear change applied to everything gets remarked on once and then forgotten about.

Say it before they find it

A returning buyer who meets a higher postage figure at checkout with no warning feels caught out, and that feeling attaches to you rather than to the courier. The same rise mentioned plainly a week earlier is just a fact about the world.