Online retailer tackles billable weight changes

An online retailer since 2006, Wholesale Marine offers products ranging from small O-ring parts to complete pontoon packages. Most of their products are individually packaged and shipped, resulting in a range of parcel sizes and weights.

When large postal carriers started adopted dimensional (dim) weight shipping, Wholesale Marine’s practice of shipping products exclusively on actual package weight made it susceptible to fees and back charges from miscalculated dimensions and freight compliance issues. After implementing an imaging and sensing system, the company automated the process of determining the optimal shipping cost.

Wholesale Marine’s distribution warehouse in Cincinnati stocks approximately 20,000 different SKUs and can ship more than 2,000 items in a single day during the peak of summer. The new dim rates reflect a package’s density, and carriers charge the greater of the actual weight or dim rates.

“Dimensional weight was really hurting us,” says Jim Stewart, owner of Wholesale Marine. “If we tried to ship something using actual weight, but it had a bigger dimensional weight, we’d get a huge ding on pricing. We were doing a manual product sort and grouping with what we thought was the cheapest shipping. We looked at an order and would say, ‘This is probably small enough for this type of shipping,’ but we weren’t capturing the dimensions.”

Even when Wholesale Marine manually measured and determined the best shipping, they still ran into problems when trying to challenge charges.

“We were getting an after-the-fact surcharge with no way to dispute it,” says Stewart. “We had a scenario where we shipped three of the exact same item. One bill came in smaller, another was what we predicted, but the last included hundreds of dollars in back charges, and we couldn’t say what the exact dimensions of the package were.”

Determining dimensional weight by manually measuring a package and solving the formula can be labor-intensive and is subject to human error. “It was manpower wasted,” Stewart says. “We were pulling someone away from another job to figure out the best shipping price for a package.”

After installing a new system Rice Lake over its pre-existing conveyor line, dimensions, package images, weight data, rate comparison and label printing are sent to one central workstation. The system handles boxed Yeti coolers as well as irregular shapes like shrink-wrapped anchors and polybags filled with fishing accessories.

“We’re not getting those dings on fees anymore,” Stewart says. “Everything is streamlined and automated as it goes through shipping. I have confidence that I am getting the least expensive shipping method, especially when we offer free shipping.”