How to Find Out If You're Overpaying for Shipping

You are probably overpaying for shipping ... if you haven't had help re-rating your last six to twelve months of shipments against your contract and against alternative carriers. A free PLD analysis from ShipTrac does that with your parcel-level data and returns a number, not a sales call.

Signs You Are Overpaying

You don't need a consultant to get a first read. If two or three of these are true, assume there is a gap and go measure it.

Where the Money Leaks

Dimensional weight

As of the 2025 carrier rate guides, UPS and FedEx both use a divisor of 139 for domestic dimensional weight on daily (commercial) rates. Take a 12 x 10 x 8 inch box that weighs 3 lb. That is 960 cubic inches, and 960 / 139 is 6.9, so you are billed for 7 lb, more than double the scale weight. Over-sized cartons and void fill show up here first, and the carrier invoice will not flag it for you.

General rate increases

UPS and FedEx each announced an average 5.9% general rate increase for 2025, in September 2024. That is an average on published rates. Your exposure depends on your discount tiers and on which accessorials rose. The quick arithmetic is annual parcels x your average label cost x 0.059, which gives you a ceiling to sanity-check against what you actually saw. If your invoices moved by more than that, look at surcharges first.

Service and carrier mix

Paying for a faster service level than the customer was promised is a common leak. So is sending every parcel through the one carrier you negotiated with, when part of your volume would price better elsewhere. This is where the answer is "it depends on your carrier mix": the gap comes from the combination of weight bands, zones, residential share and service levels, not from any single rate.

Invoice errors

Weight and dimension corrections, duplicate charges and surcharges applied to the wrong address type all land on the invoice as lines that look plausible. Without a check at the tracking-number level, they get paid.

A One-Afternoon Check You Can Run Yourself

This tells you whether you have a problem. It does not tell you what a different carrier mix would cost, because that needs other carriers' rates applied to your actual parcels. That second step is what a PLD analysis does.

What a Free PLD Analysis Returns

Parcel-level data is the shipment-by-shipment record of what you sent and what it cost. ShipTrac's RateTrac starts with a free PLD analysis built on that export. We re-rate your parcels against alternative carrier mixes, including carriers reachable through ShipTrac's collective volume, such as Uni Uni and Amazon Shipping, and return the difference as a number you can check against your own invoices.

Here is the honest version of what that number means:

If the number is worth acting on, RateTrac is how you access ShipTrac's enterprise-level rates through collective volume. If it is not, you have lost an afternoon and gained a benchmark. We are a team of operators who have negotiated with carriers, and we would rather tell you your rates are fine than sell you a switch you do not need.

Overpaying Through Your 3PL's Billing

If a 3PL ships for you, the carrier rate is only half of the question. Ask for carrier charges passed through at the tracking-number level, with the markup shown as its own line. If you receive one blended "shipping" figure per order, you cannot tell whether the rate, the markup or a carrier adjustment moved. Established brands that feel nickel-and-dimed by a 3PL are usually reacting to exactly this: not one big overcharge, but lines they cannot reconcile.

The fix is not to distrust your 3PL. A good one wants the same visibility, because billing errors cost them revenue as well.

What 3PL Billing Automation Does

If you run a 3PL, you are on the other side of this invoice. So, what is 3PL billing automation? It is software that builds client invoices from reconciled data instead of spreadsheets. Carrier charges are ingested, matched to tracking numbers, marked up under your rules and issued to the client with the checking already done. The 3PL automated invoice that results can be traced line by line, which makes disputes shorter and leakage visible.

How to automate 3PL billing

Evaluating 3PL billing automation software

When you compare 3PL billing automation software, ask whether it reconciles at the tracking-number level, whether its markup logic goes beyond a flat percentage, and what happens to a disputed line. Automated billing for 3PL operations is only as good as the data it reconciles against.

FinTrac is ShipTrac's product for 3PLs. It handles automated invoice ingestion and reconciliation, with markup flexibility beyond what a WMS billing module offers. Metering of billable activity, to stop revenue leakage at the source, is planned and not yet available, so step five above remains a manual process for now.

Where to Start

Run the afternoon check first, because it costs nothing and tells you whether to worry. Then send your shipment export for the free PLD analysis, so you have a number from your own parcels to decide on. If you are a 3PL owner and the invoice side is where the hours go, start with FinTrac.