The flat delivery fee sum: postage, packaging and the odd reshipment

Three months in, you finally add it up. Forty-odd parcels have gone out, the delivery fee has been collecting away at the same number the whole time, and the postage receipts in the shoebox total rather more than that. Nothing went wrong. No single order was a disaster. The fee was simply set on the first evening, from memory, before you had ever queued at a counter with your own product in a box. This is how you set it from the other end, from the receipts backwards.

Why one number is harder than it looks

A single fee has to survive a light parcel going three streets away and a heavier one crossing an ocean. It also has to survive you, on a Thursday, having run out of the right mailers and bought a more expensive box from the shop on the corner. Averages are unforgiving in small numbers: forty orders is not enough for the good months to cancel out the bad ones, so an optimistic fee shows up as a real hole rather than a rounding error.

Postage is also stepped, not smooth. Weight bands and thickness limits mean two products that feel identical in your hand can sit either side of a price jump, and the jump can be larger than everything else in the parcel put together. The only way to know which side you are on is to pack one properly, weigh it and take it to the counter once, before you publish anything.

Then there is the part nobody counts: parcels that need sending again. Some go missing, some arrive broken, and a few go to addresses that turned out to be wrong. It is a small percentage and it is never zero, and because it lands unevenly it feels like bad luck rather than a cost. It is a cost. Build it in and it stops being a shock.

A hopeful guess against a number you can defend

The usual approach is to look at what a courier's website says for a one-kilogram parcel, add a bit, and get on with the day. The alternative is not complicated, it is just written down. store.fan asks you for one delivery fee per physical product, shows it to the buyer before payment, and keeps the money flowing straight into your own Stripe account, since there is no platform commission on any plan. The pricing page sets out what each plan does and does not include.

Doing the sum

Work through this once per product shape rather than per product. A postcard and a mug are different sums. Two mugs of different colours are the same sum.

1. 1Pack one unit for real, with the padding you would actually use, and weigh it on kitchen scales.
2. 2Measure the thickness as well as the weight, because thickness decides the band for anything flat.
3. 3Take it to the counter and pay for the postage you would genuinely use, domestic and international if you post abroad.
4. 4Add packaging: box or mailer, filler, tape, any insert card, and the label itself.
5. 5Add a reshipment allowance. Decide what share of parcels you expect to send twice and add that fraction of a full parcel cost to every order.
6. 6Add your time at a number you would accept from someone else for the same work.
7. 7Round up to a tidy figure, then set it in Dashboard, Products on the physical product itself.
8. 8Put a date in the diary three months out to check the total collected against the total spent.

If you post abroad as well as at home

One fee covering both means domestic buyers subsidise international ones. Blending is a legitimate choice, and so is charging one fee and only posting domestically. What is not a choice is discovering the gap after the fact. Decide which way you are leaning before you publish, and revisit it once you know the real mix of near and far orders from your product analytics.

A worked example, with illustrative figures

Take a screen-printed tote. Postage for the packed weight comes to about GBP 3.20 domestically. The mailer, tissue and tape are roughly GBP 0.55. You expect around one parcel in twenty-five to need sending again, which adds about GBP 0.15 spread across every order. Packing and the walk to the post office run to five minutes, which at a modest GBP 18 an hour is GBP 1.50. The total sits near GBP 5.40, so a fee of GBP 5.50 covers you without looking invented. Those figures are illustrative, not a promise about your costs.

Now look at it from the buyer's side. On a GBP 22 tote, GBP 5.50 delivery reads as steep. On a GBP 45 order of two totes it reads as ordinary, which is an argument for a bundle rather than for cutting the fee. If you would rather the number disappeared entirely, the honest way to do that is to lift the product price and set the fee to nothing, so the postage is still paid for. What you should not do is set a fee you know is short and hope volume fixes it.

The mistake most people make

The mistake is setting the fee to match what other shops charge rather than what your parcels cost. Somebody else's GBP 3.95 delivery is built on their packaging, their courier account and their volume. Copying the number copies none of that. The second mistake is treating the fee as a marketing lever and cutting it during a promotion, which is precisely when the parcels are most numerous and the loss compounds fastest. Discount the product instead and let the delivery fee stand, which is exactly how discount codes behave here.

A delivery fee is not a pricing statement. It is a reimbursement, and the only way to know whether it is doing its job is to compare it with a stack of receipts on a date you set in advance. Do that twice a year and the shoebox stops being a source of unpleasant surprises.