£120 enumerated
One order we paid for ourselves gives a clean waterfall: £84.60 of goods, £20.00 of freight, £6.13 of service fee, £3.50 of optional packing, £4.20 of domestic freight, a £6.09 coupon and £4.10 of account credit, landing at £108.34 actually paid against a nominal basket of £120.00.
1. Add every row in the order the settlement shows it rather than in the order your bank statement shows it. 2. Separate money that left your account from money that left your balance, because a credit is not a reduction against the goods. 3. Write the paid figure at the bottom and treat £108.34, not £120.00, as the number the parcel has to beat.
Enter the four named rows of the £120 order in the sequence the settlement prints them, because that sequence fixes the denominator you divide by: goods £84.60, freight £20.00 on a 3.8 kg chargeable weight, service fee £6.13 charged at 6% of goods plus domestic freight, and packaging £3.50, with the two domestic legs billed at ¥12 and ¥8, ¥20 together, the same pair that sits inside the service-fee base (all Recorded). 1. Sum the four sterling rows to £114.23 (Recorded) and take each as a share of that sum rather than of the £120 headline, giving goods 74.1%, freight 17.5%, service fee 5.4% and packaging 3.1%, since only that denominator makes the four shares add to 100%. 2. Keep the £5.89 by which the sum exceeds the £108.34 settlement on a row of its own, because none of those four lines accounts for it (Not verified), and test it against the credit ledger before writing it off, where 9 of 14 credit events landed within 3 days and the slowest took 11 (Recorded). 3. If that gap is smaller than the £3.50 packaging row (Recorded), close the waterfall; if it is larger, re-read the yuan legs before touching the goods row. 4. Restate the comparison against the £120 headline only at the end, where the £108.34 settlement covers 90.3% of it and leaves £11.66 (Recorded), so any saving above £11.66 has to come from a different order.
Wares hold £84.60
Goods are 78% of the settled total, which makes them the row where a percentage change moves the most money. The three items in this order were priced at ¥50, ¥59 and ¥79 at the source, converted at the rate we applied on the funding date, and the £84.60 includes the domestic freight from the third seller but not the other two legs.
1. Convert each item separately and add the results, because a single conversion of the basket total hides rounding. 2. Keep the funding date beside the rate, since the rate you get is the one in force when the balance was funded. 3. If any single item is above £40.00, check its category against the weight band you expect, because expensive and heavy rarely travel together.
Compare what one goods row does across three self-purchased baskets and the ratio rather than the amount turns out to be the useful test: £84.60 of goods against the same order's £20.00 freight row is 4.23 times its own shipping cost, while the three settlements of £108.34, £48.75 and £167.93 landed at 90.3%, 121.9% and 80.0% of their £120, £40 and £210 headlines (all Recorded). 1. Divide each settlement by its own headline before comparing baskets, and treat anything above 100% as evidence that freight and fees rather than goods are setting the price on that basket. 2. Audit the goods row with QC evidence instead of with the price, because our curated set holds 85 entries and 23 flags, split into label 11, edge or border 6, hardware 4 and stitching 2 (Recorded), and 5 of those 6 edge flags were lighting artefacts, so a border complaint is a photography question before it is a goods question. 3. Request a re-shoot in named terms, part by part and angle by angle, since the 6 re-shoots answered within 6 hours when the request was explicit and took 2 days when it was vague (Recorded). 4. Size any replacement against the band table rather than against the goods price, because 3 kg is £19.60 against £13.20 at 2 kg (Recorded), so a heavier swap adds £6.40 before any goods value enters the comparison.
Cartage absorbs £20.00
Freight is the second largest row at £20.00, and on this order it broke into £8.40 of first-kilogram fee and £11.60 of weight increments for 3.8 kg chargeable. That puts the effective rate at £5.26 per kilogram, which is better than the £6.71 per kilogram we recorded on a 3.5 kg parcel travelling the same lane on its own.
1. Divide the freight row by the chargeable weight to get a rate you can compare across orders. 2. Compare that rate against the next band up, because the increment is not linear. 3. If your rate is above £7.00 per kilogram, the parcel is either light or bulky, and both of those have a fix.
Measure the carton yourself before accepting any freight figure, because volumetric weight rather than the scale reading often decides what is billed: length × width × height in centimetres, divided by 5000, 6000 or 8000, rounded up to the next 0.5 kg, with chargeable weight taken as the greater of that result and the actual weight (Recorded method). 1. Run a 40 × 30 × 25 cm carton through all three divisors, where 30,000 cubic centimetres gives 6.0 kg at 5000, 5.0 kg at 6000 and 3.75 kg at 8000, which rounds up to 4.0 kg, so one box can bill anywhere between 4.0 kg and 6.0 kg on a divisor that is not always printed. 2. Set that spread against the 3.8 kg chargeable weight behind the £20.00 freight row (Recorded), since at the recorded £5.26 per kilogramme the 6.0 kg reading would cost £31.56 and the 4.0 kg reading £21.04, both by our arithmetic on that recorded rate. 3. Treat a snapshot without a divisor as unusable, given that 3 of our 12 rate re-checks between 2026-08-01 and 2026-10-02 arrived with none, which leaves those rows Not verified and keeps them out of every comparison. 4. If the divisor for your route is missing, ask for it in writing instead of assuming 6000, and file the answer beside the re-check date, because a 1 kg swing at this rate is worth £5.26.
Rank the nine bands on a route before re-pricing anything, because two of them are flat: 8 kg and 8.5 kg both bill £43.60, and 10 kg and 11.5 kg both bill £54.60 (Recorded), so 0.5 kg and 1.5 kg of extra mass can cost nothing inside those plateaus. 1. Convert every anchor to a per-kilogramme figure first, from £8.40 at first weight and £13.20 at 2 kg through £19.60 at 3 kg, £26.40 at 3.8 kg, £31.80 at 5.1 kg and £34.80 at 6 kg (Recorded), then judge the marginal step instead of the sticker, since 3 kg to 3.8 kg adds £6.80 over 0.8 kg, which is £8.50 per kilogramme, while 3.8 kg to 5.1 kg adds £5.40 over 1.3 kg, about £4.15 per kilogramme. 2. Aim at a plateau wherever the basket allows, because 5.1 kg to 6 kg costs £3.00 for 0.9 kg and 8 kg to 8.5 kg costs nothing at all (Recorded). 3. Confirm the base before trusting any band, since 4 of our 12 re-checks over 2026-08-01 to 2026-10-02 logged a first-weight rise on an unchanged route, the largest +£1.60 (Recorded), equal to 6.1% of the £26.40 tier. 4. If a quote above 10 kg arrives, read it against the same structure, as the 14 kg quotation was (Recorded), and compare it with the £54.60 flat rate at 11.5 kg before accepting a fresh per-kilogramme price.
Handling beneath £6.40
The service fee came to £6.13, which is 6% of goods plus domestic freight, so the percentage is applied after the domestic legs rather than on the goods alone. That distinction is worth £0.25 on this order and rather more on a multi-seller basket where three domestic legs stack up.
1. Compute the base as goods plus domestic freight, not goods alone. 2. Multiply by your recorded percentage and set the result beside the figure on the settlement. 3. If the two disagree by more than £0.50, the base includes a row you have not identified yet, and the packing row is the usual candidate.
Re-price the four compressible moves against a £108.34 settlement (Recorded) and together they free about £11.20, pulling the total down to roughly £97.14 against the £120 headline. 1. Trim chargeable weight from 3.8 kg to 3.0 kg, which moves the band from £26.40 to £19.60 (Recorded), so £6.80 comes back, the largest single lever on the order and 6.3% of the settlement. 2. Keep every piece inside the free storage window, counted from the inbound scan rather than from the arrival notice, since 8 of 24 pieces ran 1 to 14 days overdue at £0.20 per piece per day (Community-reported) and the longest single charge reached about £2.80 on one piece. 3. Re-check the rate before paying, because 4 of 12 re-checks between 2026-08-01 and 2026-10-02 caught a first-weight rise on an unchanged route, the largest +£1.60 (Recorded), which is 6.1% of the £26.40 tier by itself. 4. Work the credit ledger on a 3-day clock, as 9 of 14 events landed within 3 days while the slowest took 11 (Recorded), treat the 2 voucher codes rejected in that window as zero because no reason was recorded (Not verified), and stop once the trim beats the £9.63 that service fee plus packaging take (Recorded), which leaves £99.94 with the community-reported storage charge set aside, a 7.8% trim rather than 10.3%.
Where £9.25 lurks
Two rows are easy to overlook because neither appears in the item list. Optional packing added £3.50, of which £2.50 was compression and £1.00 was corner protection, and the domestic freight rows added £4.20 for the second and third sellers. Together they are £7.70, and the remaining £1.55 sat in the difference between the rate on the funding date and the rate on the day we checked the order.
1. List the optional rows separately from the mandatory rows. 2. Decide which optional rows you would choose again at the same price. 3. Keep the ones that answer a question you actually had, and drop the ones bought out of caution, because on this order nothing in the optional group changed a single measurement.
Four steps re-costed
Re-price the same basket with four changes and the range becomes visible. Compressing the 3.8 kg parcel to 3.4 kg saves one band increment at £4.60. Dropping corner protection saves £1.00 with no measured effect. Funding the balance ten days later at the rate we recorded in the following snapshot would have changed the goods row by about £1.10 in either direction. Buying the two lighter items only would have reduced the settled total to £71.20.
1. Price each change on its own before combining them. 2. Apply the changes that remove a band increment first, because they are worth more than the optional extras. 3. Stop when the remaining moves are worth under £1.00 each, since the effort of tracking them costs more than the saving.
The data point behind this note
On our £120 order record the settled total was £108.34 against a £120.00 nominal basket, with freight at £20.00 for 3.8 kg chargeable — an effective £5.26 per kilogram — and £7.70 sitting in optional packing and multi-seller domestic legs (Recorded).
Rates last checked 2026-10-02. Where a figure is community-reported we say so; where we could not verify it, we write Not verified instead of estimating.