Parcel Shipping.
Carrier-direct rates, one account.

Parcel is generally individual packages up to about 150 lbs each that ship through small-package carriers (FedEx, UPS, USPS, Canada Post). Once a shipment is palletized or exceeds parcel weight/size limits, LTL is usually cheaper. We’ll quote both and route each order the cheaper way.

FedEx, UPS, USPS, Canada Post and regional/last-mile carriers. Because we rate-shop across all of them per shipment, you get the best cost-to-transit on each package instead of being locked to one carrier’s rate card.

Yes. We manage the customs entry, duties and taxes for cross-border parcel — set up as DDP (you prepay so the customer pays nothing on delivery) or DDU (recipient pays) — so packages clear cleanly and arrive without surprise fees.

Yes — we connect to Shopify, Amazon, Walmart and other platforms via integration or EDI, or accept a flat-file, then import orders, rate-shop, print labels and push tracking back automatically.

On billable weight — the greater of actual and dimensional weight — plus zone (distance), service level and any surcharges (residential, fuel, peak). We right-size packaging and rate-shop to keep all of those as low as possible, and audit the carrier invoices to catch overcharges.

Carriers charge for the space a package occupies as well as its mass. Dimensional weight is length × width × height in inches divided by the carrier’s DIM divisor, and you are billed on whichever is higher — that number or the scale weight. A light but bulky carton can therefore bill at two or three times its actual weight. The fix is packaging discipline: cutting an inch off each dimension, using right-sized cartons instead of one universal box, and switching void fill can move a package down a full weight break on every single order.

Surcharges are where parcel invoices quietly inflate — residential delivery, delivery-area and extended-area fees, additional handling for oversized or unpackaged items, address correction, fuel applied as a percentage of everything above, and peak-season fees layered on in Q4. We flag which ones a shipment will trigger before it ships, correct addresses at import rather than paying to fix them after, keep dimensions inside additional-handling thresholds where the packaging allows, and audit invoices afterward for late deliveries and duplicate or misapplied charges that qualify for refund.

We generate return labels the same way we generate outbound ones — printed in the box, or emailed on demand so you only pay for labels customers actually use, which is usually the cheaper option. Returns are rate-shopped too, and can route to your facility, a consolidation point or a third-party returns processor. Tracking flows back into the same view as outbound, so a return in transit is visible before the refund request lands in your inbox.

The practical ceiling across the major Canadian carriers is around thirty kilograms per piece and a girth-plus-length measurement in the region of three hundred centimetres, with a longest side limit of roughly two hundred and seventy. Beyond that a piece either attracts a large-package or over-maximum surcharge that often exceeds the base rate, or is refused outright and has to move as LTL. The limits differ slightly by carrier and by service, and they change annually. Where your product sits close to a threshold, the packaging design is worth revisiting, because a few centimetres either side of a limit is the difference between a normal rate and a penalty.

There is no single right answer, which is the reason to rate-shop rather than sign one contract. Canada Post has the broadest residential and rural coverage and is usually the cheapest to remote postal codes. Purolator is strong on Canadian business-to-business and time-definite service. UPS and FedEx are strongest on cross-border and international, and on guaranteed express. Regional carriers can beat all of them inside a single province. We route each shipment against the profile rather than the brand, which normally means using several carriers rather than defending one relationship.

A residential surcharge applies when the delivery address is a home rather than a commercial address, and a delivery area surcharge applies when the postal code sits outside the carrier core network. Both are per-package and both are quietly significant on a direct-to-consumer programme, frequently adding more than the difference between two carriers base rates. They cannot be negotiated away entirely, but they can be managed: routing rural and remote postal codes to the carrier with the lowest surcharge for that region, and offering pickup point delivery as an option, are the two levers that actually work.

Large parts of northern and remote Canada are served on extended transit and at a substantial surcharge, and some postal codes are served only by Canada Post or by a regional specialist. Committed delivery dates usually do not apply, and air-dependent destinations can be weather-affected for days at a time. If a meaningful share of your orders goes to these areas, the honest fix is to build the surcharge into your shipping policy and set customer expectations on transit, rather than absorbing the cost quietly and being surprised by the freight invoice.

This is the single most common source of a bad customer experience on cross-border direct-to-consumer shipping. Low-value shipments to the United States may clear under the informal entry threshold, but the rules on eligibility, on what counts as a single shipment and on which goods are excluded have tightened, and they change. Shipments above the threshold need a formal or informal entry with a correct tariff classification and country of origin. We set the entry type per shipment rather than assuming, and we tell you which of your products cannot travel this way.

For direct-to-consumer, delivered duty paid is almost always the right choice. Under delivered duty unpaid the carrier bills the recipient for duty, tax and a brokerage fee at the door, which produces refused deliveries, chargebacks and a customer who will not order again. Delivered duty paid puts the charge on you and lets you show a landed total at checkout. The cost is that you have to calculate duty and tax correctly at the point of sale, which needs accurate tariff classification on your catalogue. For business-to-business shipments to a customer with their own broker, unpaid can be appropriate.

Carriers include a small default liability per package, typically a few hundred dollars, and anything above that requires declared value, which is a fee rather than insurance. Claims need the tracking number, proof of value, and for damage, photographs of the packaging as well as the item, filed inside the carrier deadline, which can be as short as a few weeks. Packaging is what decides most damage claims: a carrier will decline where the packaging was inadequate for parcel handling. On high-value or fragile programmes, third-party parcel insurance is usually cheaper than carrier declared value.

Zone skipping means moving a batch of parcels by truck to a carrier facility near the destination region and injecting them there, so each parcel travels fewer carrier zones and pays a shorter-zone rate. It pays when you have consistent daily or weekly volume into a distant region, enough to fill a trailer or a significant part of one, and when your transit promise can absorb the linehaul day. It does not pay on low or irregular volume, where the linehaul cost is spread across too few parcels. We model it on your actual order data rather than on a rule of thumb.

The crossover is usually somewhere between three and six cartons to one address, but weight, dimensions and surcharges move it. The test worth running is total landed cost: sum the parcel rate plus fuel plus every applicable surcharge for all the cartons, then compare that with the LTL rate for one palletised shipment plus any accessorials such as residential or liftgate delivery. Multi-piece parcel shipments with dimensional weight penalties frequently lose to LTL well before the carton count feels large. We run that comparison automatically rather than defaulting to one mode.

Yes. Carrier declared value is a liability limit purchased from the carrier, and it is assessed against the carrier own terms, which include broad exclusions and a packaging defence. Third-party parcel insurance is a separate policy, usually cheaper per hundred dollars of value, with a simpler claims process and fewer exclusions. For programmes shipping high-value or fragile goods it is normally the better instrument. We will tell you which of your shipments justify it rather than adding cover to everything, because on low-value goods the premium outweighs the loss rate.

From roughly October to January, and at other demand peaks, carriers apply temporary surcharges on top of normal rates. They typically hit residential delivery, large packages, additional handling and any volume above a baseline the carrier sets from your earlier shipping history. The last of those catches growing merchants hardest, because exceeding your own baseline is what triggers it. The practical response is to forecast peak volume with the carrier in advance, spread volume across more than one carrier so no single baseline is breached, and price the surcharge into your seasonal shipping policy.

Yes, though it is worth checking whether parcel is the right mode. Business-to-business parcel avoids residential surcharges and delivers on commercial schedules, but receivers that require a booked appointment, a dock delivery, a signature from a named person or compliance with a routing guide are usually better served by LTL, because parcel networks are not built around appointments. Where the receiver has a routing guide, following it matters more than the rate, since a non-compliant delivery generates a chargeback that dwarfs the freight saving.