The Importance of Dimensional Weight for FedEx’s Weight Calculation

by Luke Kupersmith on 2012-02-11

There are many ways to reduce your shipping costs, but to do this, you need to be knowledgeable about smaller aspects of shipping you may have not been privy to before.  One of the more immediate ways to save on shipping is by focusing on large packages you ship. 

Here, we’ll hone in on FedEx specifically, although the general lessons here can be applied to UPS as well.  FedEx, when checking over your shipments, usually checks the actual weight of an item to determine the shipping cost.  However, they will charge you based on the physical dimensions of your package if it goes over a certain allotted size, which they specifically term as dimensional weight. 

The measurement may still be the same, in kilograms or pounds, but the actual methodology to determining the size in this way is solely through the dimensions of your package.  If you utilize the shipping staff to calculate the cost based on the dimensional weight, it can be a very consuming and laborious process.  Even worse, it can be prone to multiple errors and can increase overall shipping costs, especially if your company tend to ship hundreds or thousands of packages every month.

One solution can be through a third party shipping auditing company that has special applications for streamlining the formula used in the FedEx