Ecommerce shipping solutions: what shipping software and carrier rates actually cost a small shop

What the companies publish for this

How to work out what your outbound really costs

1. Band your own orders first. Take a month of dispatches and sort them by packed weight against the published bands. Most small shops discover their volume sits in one or two bands and they have been optimising the wrong one.
2. Price those bands, not the headline. Evri's published 0-1kg Small is £3.04 and its 2-5kg is £6.59. If most of your orders are 900g, the second number is irrelevant to you.
3. Decide direct or broker. A broker resells carriers at negotiated rates, which is why Parcel2Go's pages price named services like Evri Standard Parcelshop and DPD Lite. Compare that against the carrier's own published band.
4. Price the international tail separately. On the published destination figures, Germany is £7.79 and the USA £11.59. A shop with a five per cent overseas tail is running two different businesses on shipping.

What the published figures mean for a shop's margin

The interesting spread for a small shop is not between carriers, it is between bands within one carrier. Evri publishes £3.04 for 0-1kg Small and £4.79 for 1-2kg Standard, which is £1.75 apart for parcels a customer would call the same size. Packing that keeps orders in the lower band is worth more than any carrier switch at that volume.

Royal Mail's grid shows the same thing across services rather than sizes. Its 2nd Class Small Parcel is £3.95 online and its Tracked 48 Small Parcel is £3.65, so the tracked service is cheaper than the untracked one. A shop that defaults to 2nd Class because it sounds cheap is paying more and getting less.

Where shipping software actually sits

Nothing in this record prices shipping software, and this page does not pretend to. What the record establishes is the layer underneath it: the carrier rates a tool is negotiating, printing labels for and choosing between. A tool that saves you thirty pence a parcel is worth having at a thousand parcels a month and is noise at fifty.

The one measurable thing this record can say about the tools is that the booking brokers who sell them mostly will not publish a rate card. Five companies here were read in full with no price on the page, and seven refused the request outright.

The international half a shop forgets

Every published destination figure in this record is carriage only. Import duty and import VAT at the far end are the customer's problem unless the shop has chosen delivered duty paid, and that choice is the single most common cause of refused parcels and chargebacks on a small shop's overseas orders.

The paperwork is the other half: a CN22 or CN23, a commercial invoice and a commodity code per line. None of the four companies that publish a price publishes what it charges to get any of that wrong.

Questions people ask about this

What does ecommerce shipping cost per parcel in the UK?

On published bands, from £3.04 for a 0-1kg Small with Evri and £3.65 for a Tracked 48 Small Parcel with Royal Mail bought online. Both read on 10 September 2026, and both are carriage only.

Is a booking broker cheaper than a carrier account for a small shop?

It depends on volume, and the published figures cannot settle it because most brokers publish no rate card. What is visible is that Parcel2Go's destination pages resell named carrier services, so the comparison is that broker's rate for that service against the carrier's own published band.

How much does it cost to ship an order to Europe?

On Parcel2Go's own destination pages, from £7.79 to Germany, £7.99 to the Netherlands, £9.19 to Spain and £9.39 to France, each the cheapest of five services priced on that page for the parcel it quotes by default.

Should a shop charge the customer duty or pay it?

That is the delivered duty paid choice and it is a commercial decision, not a shipping one. Paying it yourself costs margin; leaving it with the customer costs refused parcels. Nothing in this record prices either, because no carrier publishes it.

Sending this abroad

• Australia: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Bahrain: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Belgium: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Brazil: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Bulgaria: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Canada: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• China: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Croatia: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Cyprus: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• the Czech Republic: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Egypt: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• France: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Germany: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Greece: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Guernsey: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Hong Kong: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Hungary: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• India: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Ireland: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• the Isle of Man: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Italy: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Japan: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Jersey: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Kenya: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Libya: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Lithuania: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Malaysia: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Malta: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Mauritius: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Montenegro: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• the Netherlands: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• New Zealand: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Northern Ireland: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Norway: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Pakistan: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Poland: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Portugal: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Qatar: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Romania: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Saudi Arabia: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Singapore: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• South Africa: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• South Korea: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Spain: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Thailand: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• the UAE: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• the USA: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages
• Vietnam: what carriers publish for a parcel, from their own price pages