What an Ecommerce Shipping Analysis Can Uncover

Three data sets normally live in three different places. Order data sits in your store platform. Product dimensions sit in your catalog or in someone's spreadsheet. Charges sit on carrier invoices that finance approves. Each one on its own supports only weak conclusions.

A shipping analysis joins them. When you can see that a specific SKU ships in a specific carton, to a specific zone distribution, at a specific service level, and gets billed a specific way, the causes of your cost per order stop being theoretical. You get a ranked list where each item names the change and the mechanism.

It is a read, not a migration. Nothing about your carriers, labels, or platform changes in order to run one.

1. 1. Dimensional-weight exposure, by SKU

   Carriers bill the greater of actual and dimensional weight, calculated domestically as (L x W x H) / 139. An analysis maps your highest-velocity SKUs to the cartons they actually ship in and shows exactly which products are being billed as heavier than they are. This is usually the single largest recurring finding, and it is fixed with cartons rather than with a rate negotiation.

2. 2. Zone skew you weren't pricing for

   Plotting order destinations against your ship-from location shows how much volume travels into far zones. High zone-6-through-8 concentration changes three decisions at once: which carriers should be quoting your lanes, whether a second fulfillment node pays for itself, and what your free-shipping threshold should actually be.

3. 3. Service-mix waste

   Comparing the service level purchased against the delivery promise each order carried at checkout regularly reveals expedited and air service bought for standard-promise orders. It is the fastest reduction on the list because it is an internal routing decision, not a carrier conversation.

4. 4. Surcharge leakage

   Residential charges on commercial addresses, delivery-area surcharges on ZIPs that moved off the carrier's list, address-correction fees on valid addresses, additional handling on packages that no longer qualify. Individually small, collectively a meaningful percentage of the invoice — and refundable when misapplied.

5. 5. Free-shipping thresholds that lose money

   Once you can see cost per order by zone and weight band, you can test your threshold against reality. Many stores set one at a round number years ago and now subsidize heavy, far-zone orders on every one. The analysis gives you the band where the threshold stops being profitable.

6. 6. Carrier mix left on the table

   Dense short-zone and metro volume is often priced better by regional carriers, while nationals hold the advantage on complete coverage, air, and international. An analysis quantifies how much of your volume falls in each bucket, so blending carriers becomes an evidence-based decision instead of a preference.

7. 7. Returns cost you never isolated

   Return labels, restocking movements, and reverse-lane surcharges are frequently buried in the same invoice as outbound. Separating them shows the true landed cost per order and whether your return policy is priced correctly for your category.

• Zone distribution — Where your demand actually is versus where you ship from. This is the input to node placement, regional carrier selection, and threshold pricing.
• Weight bands — The distribution of billed weight per order, which determines which rate breaks matter to you and which are irrelevant.
• Promise versus purchase — What speed you told the customer, against what service you bought. The gap between those two is money.
• Order composition — Single-item versus multi-item orders, and whether multi-item orders are being split into multiple parcels that could ship as one.
• Seasonality — Peak concentration, which drives peak surcharge exposure and whether you need alternate capacity for a specific window rather than year-round.

Catalog data is the part most operators do not have clean, and it is where the durable savings hide. The analysis needs product dimensions and weights mapped to the cartons each product actually ships in — then it can calculate dimensional weight per SKU and rank your catalog by overcharge, highest first.

If you do not have that list, it is not a blocker. HTL's Catalog Scan reads published product dimensions directly from a Shopify storefront, which is enough to produce a first-pass dimensional-weight ranking before anyone exports anything.

• Three months of order exports — From Shopify, Amazon, ShipStation, or your own system. Destination, weight, service, and promised speed are the fields that matter most.
• A product and carton list — Dimensions and weights, plus which box each product ships in. Approximate is fine to start.
• A PLD file or three months of invoices — Parcel Level Detail is better because it exposes each charge on each package rather than a summary.
• Your carrier agreement — Needed to test whether contracted discounts and tiers were actually applied to every service and location.
• An NDA, if you want one — HTL reviews order and parcel data under NDA on request. Say so up front and it is handled before any file moves.

Do not have any of it collected yet? Company, email and rough monthly volume from the Parcel Solutions page is enough for HTL to come back with a directional read and tell you which file to pull first.