Just ran the numbers on our shipping costs and I'm shook

I was going through our Q3 P&L last night and noticed our shipping line item jumped 22% from last year. Turns out our carrier reclassified our packages as "dimensional weight" on over half our orders. Our ops manager never flagged it because he just looks at the totals each month. I called the carrier this morning and they admitted we could have been on a different rate tier this whole time. Has anyone else caught hidden fees eating into their margins like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

haydenp957d agoMost Upvoted

Wait are we really celebrating getting a partial refund after threatening to leave? Thats like being happy your landlord only raised rent 15% instead of 20%. The real issue here is that carriers build these hidden rate changes into their contracts on purpose knowing most small ops managers dont dig into line items. You got your 90 day audit back but the system is still rigged against you. Ive seen companies waste weeks every quarter fighting billing errors instead of improving their actual shipping process. Maybe instead of playing whack-a-mole with refunds we should be pushing for standardized billing that actually makes sense from the start.

danielwhite1mo ago

Had the same thing happen with FedEx a couple years back. They waited until we hit our peak shipping season to switch us over and we didn't catch it for three months. Ended up getting a partial refund after I threatened to pull all our volume. Make sure you ask for a 90 day lookback audit. Most carriers will give you at least some money back if you push hard enough.

julia_burns91mo ago

Oh man, @danielwhite you're so right about the timing game carriers play - I actually had a similar billing fiasco that I didn't catch until I accidentally used my company credit card at a gas station and saw a charge from a carrier I thought I'd left YEARS ago. Total IDIOT move on my part, but I did exactly what you said and asked for a 90 day audit and got a few hundred bucks back. Nothing like admitting you fell for the same trick twice to keep the ego in check.