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Major UPS Changes Coming Soon


JoeWoodworker

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For anyone shipping with UPS, an important change is coming soon that may dramatically affect your business. Beginning in January, UPS will be applying dimensional weight to all ground packages. If you ship a lot of large, light weight packages, be prepared to see huge increases in shipping costs.

 

Dimensional weight is used by the carriers to determine final charges, if the package size is disproportionate to package weight.

 

One example...

A box that is 14" x 14" x 18" will ship (ground) at the 18 lb rate regardless of its actual weight if that weight is less than 18lbs. So if you ship a box of that weighs 4lbs, you will be charged the 18lb rate. But if that same size box weighs 21 lbs, you will be charged at the 21 lb rate.

 

For some businesses, this change will not have a huge impact. But for others, like mine, it could be the kiss of death.

 

Fedex has not yet committed to this profit tactic but they are notorious for following the foot steps of UPS. I currently ship with both Fedex and UPS. When I asked my Fedex rep about it, she said that Fedex may decide to sit back and see what the backlash is against UPS when the new pricing goes into effect. Clearly, this is a major opportuniy for Fedex to make a serious amount of new customers.

 

Voice your thoughts to your UPS rep. Tell them you are switching to Fedex, DHL, or USPS. Now is the time to act upon this.

 

Best wishes to everyone,

Joe :o

Evil will always triumph over good...

Because good is dumb.

- D.H.

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I've posted a thread about this before.

 

FedEx seems to be playing their cards closely to their chest. We've been in constant contact with both of our UPS and FedEx account managers and from what we can tell, FedEx management is refusing to allow their Account managers to inform customers on what their plans are.

 

This doesn't apply to boxes under 12 x 12 x 12.

 

In your example, it would actuall be shipped at 19# ;)

 

For us, this change has significant impact, if FedEx follows. At least 80% of our shipments would be affected (probably more like 90+). A couple of examples, 1 box of products weighs 8# but will now ship at 18#. Another box ships now at 12# but with dim. weight ships at 26#, and lastly another box we have which ships at 18# (Oversize 1 so gets billed at 30) will now be billed at 47#.

 

Hopefully fedex doesn't change to this system. Our business is already commited to moving 100% of our business to fedex (we currently only ship ups) and we ship about $300 ups fees/day.

 

I imagine a lot of UPS account managers are quite worried ;)

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