Two rule types: a flat rate for all orders, and per-country rules that override it for specific markets.
Shipping is the second-largest variable cost in most DTC catalogues and the one least likely to be recorded accurately. Cost of goods is a number on a supplier invoice. Shipping is a base rate plus fuel, plus a residential surcharge, plus a remote-area fee, plus dimensional weight if the box was bigger than the contents needed — settled weeks after the parcel arrived.
The result is a store that knows its gross margin to the cent and its delivered margin not at all. Configuring rates here closes that gap: every order gets a shipping cost, so contribution margin means something, and the products that quietly cost more to deliver than they earn become visible.
Rules are what you configure on this page — a flat rate for everything, optionally overridden per delivery country. They apply immediately, need no integration, and are an estimate.
Carrier sync connects ShipStation or Shippo and reads the actual cost of the label that shipped each order. It is exact, it captures surcharges you would never have modelled, and it requires an API credential.
Most stores start with rules and move to sync. The two coexist: with a carrier connected, matched orders use the real label cost and everything else falls back to your rules, so the ladder never has a hole in it.
Go to Costs → Shipping tab. Enter a flat shipping cost that applies to every order. This is your baseline.
Add country-specific shipping costs. Per-country rules override the flat rate for orders shipping to that country.
When an order comes in, NetNet checks: (1) Is there a per-country rule for this order's shipping country? If yes, use it. (2) If no country rule matches, use the flat rate. (3) If no flat rate is set, shipping cost is $0.
Per-country rules take priority over the flat rate. Orders from unlisted countries use the flat rate fallback.
The flat rate should be your realistic blended cost per order, not your cheapest domestic rate. If half your parcels cost four dollars and half cost eleven, a four-dollar flat rate does not make you profitable — it makes half your orders look profitable when they are not.
Per-country overrides earn their place as soon as you ship internationally, because international shipping is rarely a small multiple of domestic. A store shipping mostly at home with a trickle of overseas orders will find that the overseas trickle is where the margin is going, and a single flat rate averages that signal away entirely.
Rules are configuration, not per-order entry: set them once and they apply to every order going forward, including new countries as soon as you add a rule for them.
Connected carriers report the cost the carrier actually billed. That includes postage, and it includes everything baked into the rate at purchase — insurance, accessorial charges, residential and remote-area surcharges, fuel.
These are precisely the costs that make a modelled rate wrong, and they are not evenly distributed. Surcharges concentrate on particular postcodes and particular parcel shapes, so they hit some products far harder than others. A flat rule spreads that unevenness across the whole catalogue and hides it.
Labels are matched to orders by order number. Anything the matcher cannot place is flagged rather than dropped, and can be attached to the right order by hand or discarded; a manual match is preserved and later syncs will not overwrite it. Foreign-currency labels are converted at daily rates.
Both providers can be connected at once, and each provider's label costs are summed per order — the right behaviour for a store that splits domestic and international across two platforms.
Once shipping costs are landing, the question worth asking is not what shipping costs in total. It is which orders and which products carry more of it than they earn.
Look for the gap between shipping charged and shipping paid. Free-shipping thresholds are the usual culprit: an offer set at a level that made sense when the average basket was larger, quietly funding delivery on orders that no longer clear the cost.
Then look per product. Heavy or bulky items with healthy gross margin routinely land in the bottom quartile once they carry their own delivery, and nothing in the gross margin column ever suggested it.
Yes, as a fallback. Connected carriers supply the actual label cost per order, but any order whose label cannot be matched — or that shipped before the connection existed — falls back to your configured rules. Leaving them set means no order is ever costed at zero.
The country rule wins for orders delivering to that country; the flat rate covers everywhere else. There is one level of override, so an order matches at most one country rule and otherwise takes the flat rate.
It was removed. The interface offered it while the calculator never applied it, so rates entered there silently did nothing. Rather than leave a control that lies, it was taken out — carrier sync is the accurate replacement, because it reads what the label actually cost rather than modelling it.
That is revenue, and it is tracked separately from what fulfilment cost you. The two rarely match: free-shipping thresholds and flat-rate offers mean the gap between shipping charged and shipping paid is one of the more common sources of quiet margin loss.
Yes, on connected carriers. A refunded or voided label is soft-deleted so the audit trail survives, and the order's shipping cost rolls back. Labels pending a refund stay billable until the refund is accepted, because until then the money is still spent.