Estimate haul weight before you submit a parcel

Shipping is often the second-largest line on a haul

The goods are quoted in yuan on a store page. The shipping is quoted in grams by a warehouse, weeks later, after everything has arrived and you have already paid for it all. That is the wrong order to learn a number in. A haul that looked cheap becomes an expensive one at the submit-parcel screen, and by then the only choices left are bad ones.

An estimate before you order changes what you can do about it. Two hoodies and a pair of boots is roughly two and a half kilograms of goods. If you already know that, you can decide to split the parcel, to hold the boots for a second order, or to accept it — while the decision is still yours to make.

Put everything you plan to ship into one haul

The weight is a haul total, not a shelf total. Cards sitting loose on the shelf are not in it. Open the haul and the weight sits next to the pipeline counts, so it moves as you add and remove cards.

Items you have marked returned are left out. They are not going in the box, so counting them would only inflate the number.

Set the category, because that is the fallback

When nothing better is known, the estimate comes from the category. Shirt reads as a tee, outerwear as a light jacket, pants as jeans, shoes as a low sneaker. A card left on Other estimates as a generic item at about 300 grams, which is the least useful answer available.

The title is read too, and it beats the category when it is more specific. A card titled with hoodie, 卫衣, puffer, 羽绒服, boots or 靴 is estimated as that thing rather than as its broad category. A hoodie is roughly triple the weight of a tee, so the difference is not a rounding detail.

A weight in the listing beats every guess

Chinese listings often state a shipping weight, sometimes in the description and sometimes only in an album note. When that text is on the card, the number is read out of it and used directly, with a small margin either side rather than a wide band.

This is the single highest-value thing you can paste. One line of seller text replaces a category guess with a real figure.

Your own number wins outright

A weight you type by hand overrides everything else, with no band around it. Use it for anything you have owned before, or anything you have put on a kitchen scale. Repeat buys are where this pays: the second order of the same hoodie should never be a guess.

A tilde, and often a range

The total is always shown with a ~ in front of it, and grams become kilograms above one kilogram. Where the spread is wide enough to matter you see a low and high figure as well, because a puffer is honestly somewhere between 600 grams and 1.4 kilograms and pretending otherwise would be a false precision.

If nothing on the haul can be estimated at all, no number is shown. An empty space is more honest than a made-up total.

Boxes, bags, and the padding around them

The figure covers the goods, not the parcel. Shoeboxes are the usual surprise: a boxed pair of sneakers carries roughly 400 grams of cardboard that nobody wants to pay to ship, which is why agents offer to remove them. Poly bags, tags and the outer carton all add more.

Add packaging on top of the total yourself. If your agent offers to remove shoeboxes, that is usually the cheapest weight you will ever save.

The haul board does that arithmetic for you, and it also measures the box. Planning the parcel covers the packaging percentages and the box-size rule that decides which weight you pay on.

The warehouse scale is the real answer

This is a planning aid built from category bands, listing text and your own entries. It is not a measurement. Your agent weighs the parcel before it ships and that number is the one you are billed on, including any volumetric rule the carrier applies to a large light box.

The estimate is here so the warehouse figure is not a shock. Treat a number that lands close as luck, and a number that lands far off as information for the next haul.