How do Indian couriers decide what to charge?
Two inputs, and only two. The first is distance, entered as a zone: within the city, within the state, within the region, across the country, and a separate band for the North East, Jammu & Kashmir and the islands. The second is chargeable weight, which is where parcels go wrong. Every carrier in India bills on the greater of what the parcel weighs on a scale and what its dimensions imply, and the second figure is the one sellers forget to check. Enter the packed box in the calculator above and it tells you which of the two you are being billed on, before you commit to a shipping charge on a listing.
What is volumetric weight and why does it matter?
Volumetric weight is length x width x height in centimetres divided by 5000, read as kilograms. A folded suit set weighing 400 grams travels in a carton that bills as 900 grams, and the invoice is correct — the box was the problem. A 500 grams parcel that lands two grams over a slab boundary is billed at the next slab entirely. This matters because it is the one part of a courier bill entirely within your control. Rates are set by contract; packing is set by you. If the calculator above shows your parcel billing on volumetric weight, a flatter and tighter pack moves it down a slab with nothing about the goods changing. If it bills on actual weight, packing will not help and only lighter goods will.
Which courier should a small seller use?
It depends on what is actually constraining you. DTDC runs a franchise counter network, so you can book without a contract and branches quote differently from one another. Delhivery is built around e-commerce pickups and is usually reached through an aggregator, with rates tiered by your monthly volume — a seller past 10 orders a day is the shape it fits, and one sending 4 orders a day sits at the bottom of every tier. Blue Dart runs a dedicated air fleet and prices as a premium, which is worth paying on high-value or date-critical orders and wasteful on a ₹450 one. Speed Post charges from a published tariff that is identical for every sender and reaches pincodes private networks surcharge or decline. Each of those four pages goes into how that network prices.
What does the weight slab leave out?
Enough to change whether an order made money. Fuel surcharge applies as a percentage of freight and scales with every parcel. COD handling is charged as a flat amount or a percentage of the collected value, whichever is higher, so the same fee reads very differently against a ₹300 sale and a ₹2,000 one. Out-of-delivery-area charges apply to pincodes outside the regular delivery beat. Weight discrepancy charges arrive when the courier measures your parcel differently from what you declared. And the largest of them is the return, which has been paid for twice in freight and earned nothing.
How much does a return actually cost you?
Both freight legs, the packing material, and any advertising spent winning the order — none of it refunded. In apparel, returns are structural rather than exceptional, so model them as a percentage of orders instead of an occasional event. That is also why reducing returns is worth more to a small seller than any courier rate negotiation she is likely to win. Most apparel returns start as expectation gaps: the colour read differently on a screen, the fit was not what the photograph implied, or the size chart was in centimetres and the buyer thinks in inches. Those are catalogue problems arriving dressed as logistics problems.
Why are no courier rates published on this page?
Because courier pricing is contract data, not public data. Two sellers shipping identical parcels from the same city pay different amounts depending on volume, aggregator, franchise and the date the contract was signed. A table here would be wrong for almost everybody, and it is exactly the number a seller sets her shipping charge against — being wrong in her favour fails later and at scale, which is worse than being absent. Speed Post is the one exception, because India Post notifies its tariff officially; read it at indiapost.gov.in. For everything else, read your own rate from your courier account or aggregator dashboard and bring it back to the chargeable weight above, which is exact.