Plan the parcel before you pay to ship it

The scale is not the only thing being measured

You add up the listing weights, you get 3 kg, and you plan for a 3 kg shipment. Then the warehouse packs a jacket, two hoodies, and a shoe box into a carton, and the quote comes back on 4.8 kg. Nothing was wrong with your addition. The carrier simply did not bill the scale.

Air freight sells space, not mass. A carton full of down and foam takes the room of something far heavier, so every carrier bills the larger of two numbers: what the parcel weighs, and what the parcel occupies. The second one is called volumetric weight, and it is the one people forget.

You find out at the worst moment. The items are already bought, the haul is already in the warehouse, and the only remaining choice is which shipping line to accept. The planner moves that number earlier, to the point where you can still drop an item or split the box.

Put one shipment in one haul

The parcel planner lives on the haul board, above the items. It measures a haul, not a card, because a haul is what leaves the warehouse in one carton.

So the grouping has to be right first. If your winter order and your summer order share a haul, the estimate describes a box you never intend to ship. Organizing the haul is the step before this one.

Set a budget, so the estimate has something to sit against

Press Set a budget and enter a number in the haul currency. The board then reads the budget, what you have spent, and the percentage of the budget that is gone.

This matters more for shipping than for anything else on the shelf. Shipping is often the second-largest line on a haul, and it arrives after every item price is fixed. A budget with 96 percent already spent tells you the parcel is the decision, not the last item.

Enter the weight, the box, and the padding

Press Estimate the parcel. The editor asks for three things.

• Weight (g). Grams, not kilograms. Use the warehouse figure once your agent posts it. Before that, the haul weight estimate is the number to start from.
• Box size (cm). Three fields marked L, W, and H. Centimetres, outside measurements, the carton and not the garment.
• Packaging. No extra packaging, standard, or reinforced.

None of the three is required on its own. Weight alone gives you an answer. Box alone gives you an answer. Both give you the answer that is worth having.

Length by width by height, divided by 5000

Volumetric weight is a volume converted into kilograms with a fixed divisor. Credenza uses 5000, which is the common air divisor: multiply the three centimetre measurements, then divide by 5000.

A 40 by 30 by 20 cm carton is 24,000 cubic centimetres. Divide by 5000 and the volumetric weight is 4.8 kg. If the contents weigh 3.2 kg, the carrier bills 4.8 kg. Squash the same contents into 40 by 30 by 12 cm and the volumetric weight falls to 2.88 kg, so the carrier bills the real 3.2 kg instead. The items did not change. The box did.

Packaging is added to the weighed side only, because padding has mass but the box measurement already includes it. Standard adds 10 percent, reinforced adds 20 percent, and no extra packaging adds nothing.

Chargeable weight is the larger of the two

The editor shows a line reading Chargeable as soon as it has enough to compute one. That figure is the larger of the padded actual weight and the volumetric weight, which is exactly what the carrier bills.

Save it, and the haul board replaces the button with a stat that reads the chargeable weight. It sits beside the budget, so one glance covers both halves of what the haul costs.

Every figure carries a tilde. It is an estimate, and the note under the editor says so: the buying agent weighs and measures the final parcel, and that measurement wins over anything computed here.

Three decisions the estimate actually changes

• Split the haul. Two smaller boxes sometimes beat one large one, because each is billed on its own weight rather than one shared volume.
• Ask for compression. If volumetric beats actual, tell the agent to remove shoe boxes and vacuum the padded items. You are paying for air.
• Hold an item back. A single bulky coat can decide the box size for everything else. Moving it to the next haul can cost less than shipping it now.

The planner is free

The parcel planner and the haul budget are on both plans. There is no daily limit and no per-haul limit, because neither one calls a server — the arithmetic runs on your phone.

What Pro changes is how many hauls you can hold at once: 2 on free, 100 on Pro. Splitting a shipment into separate hauls is the normal way to use this page, and that is the limit you meet first.