Ledger drawdowns
Compare the three ways money reaches the platform on the amount that actually leaves your account rather than on the number on the basket. Our three self-paid settlements were £108.34, £48.75 and £167.93, and the difference between the cheapest and dearest funding route on those three came to £4.30 in total.
1. Write the settled total first. 2. Add every fee that appears outside that total, including conversion and funding charges. 3. Compare the two figures and treat the larger one as your real cost.
Enter every account debit as four columns — date, label, pounds, source record — before comparing payment routes, because one self-purchased record headed £120 splits into goods £84.60, outbound carriage £20.00, service £6.13 (6% of goods plus domestic freight), packaging £3.50 and domestic courier charges of ¥12 plus ¥8, and settles at £108.34 (Recorded). Re-add the sterling lines and they reach £114.23, so roughly £5.89 of credit has to sit somewhere in the same statement; where it does not appear, withhold the label and ask for the credit line by name. Keep the yuan lines in yuan until they post, because folding ¥12 and ¥8 into sterling early hides the day the conversion happened. Sort credits from refunds in the same pass, since of 14 credit events we logged, 9 arrived within 3 days and the slowest took 11 days (Recorded), which makes 14 days the shortest window that can close a balance check. Quarantine any debit that carries no source record for 7 days rather than deleting it, and where two debits share a label on one day, split them by the weight column before escalating anything. Tie each debit to a weight basis as you go — actual kilograms on the scale, or volumetric kilograms from length × width × height ÷ 5000, 6000 or 8000, rounded up to the next 0.5 kg, with the billable weight taken as the larger of the two (Recorded method).
Plastic in pounds
A card charged in pounds avoids a second conversion because the platform bills in the currency the card holds, and the cost shows up as a percentage rather than as a fixed line. Community-reported figures for UK debit and credit settlements sit at about 2% of the amount, which on the £108.34 settlement is about £2.17 and on the £167.93 settlement about £3.36.
1. Check whether the settlement currency matches your card currency. 2. If it does, the fee is the only extra row and it is proportional. 3. If it does not, expect your card issuer to add a conversion margin on top of the platform fee.
Compare the card route on three columns only: the pounds figure that posts to the issuer, the billable kilograms behind it, and the day the line appeared. Across 12 rate reviews taken between 2026-08-01 and 2026-10-02 (Recorded) we could rebuild the volumetric sum on 9 of them; the other 3 named no divisor, so those kilograms stay Not verified and the charge cannot be audited from the statement alone. Where the divisor is missing, leave the row unrated rather than guessing between 5000, 6000 and 8000, and mark the pounds column pending instead of copying a figure you cannot defend. Read the band boundary as closely as the band price, because our grid runs 6 lines × 9 steps from 0.5 kg to 10 kg with boundaries at 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 10 kg: first weight £8.40, 2 kg £13.20, 5.1 kg £31.80, 8 kg £43.60 and 10 kg £54.60 (Recorded). Both 8.5 kg and 11.5 kg price at the figure of the band beneath them, so shaving 0.5 kg or 1.5 kg from either one changes nothing, while a 14 kg parcel is quoted through that same nine-step structure rather than a separate scale (Recorded). Then test the rate you were given: 4 of the 12 reviews logged a first-weight rise on a route we had already priced, the largest +£1.60 (Recorded), so re-price any line whose route has not been reviewed for 21 days.
Intermediary in pounds
The same settlement through an intermediary wallet carries a similar percentage and adds one extra step where the money changes hands twice rather than once. Community-reported figures put that route near 4% of the amount, which on the £108.34 settlement is about £4.33 against about £2.17 by card, a difference of £2.16 on one order.
1. Check whether the funding source is a card or a bank balance. 2. Note the platform's fee and the intermediary's fee separately. 3. Add both before comparing the route against a direct card settlement.
Judge the PayPal route by the pair of pound figures it produces — the one shown at approval and the one that leaves the balance — because a balance settlement reverses into the same balance while the warehouse clock keeps running. Keep the two figures as separate rows, since only one of them normally shows on the activity line, and compare them again once a credit lands. Of 85 curated QC entries we hold, 23 carried a flag: label 11, edge or border 6 with 5 of those explained as lighting artefacts, hardware 4 and stitching 2 (Recorded), and a flagged entry is normally what raises the credit in the first place. Escalate in one line: name the frame you want re-shot and set the 6-hour reply expectation, because the 6 explicit re-shoot requests we sent were answered inside 6 hours while the vague ones took 2 days (Recorded). Storage is the cost PayPal cannot reverse for you, since the free window starts at inbound scan and overdue storage runs about £0.20 per item per day (Community-reported): 8 of 24 items in our sample ran 1 to 14 days past the window, the longest at roughly £2.80 (Community-reported). Link the clocks before a settlement: if a re-shoot is still pending, ask in writing whether storage is paused, and where the answer is no, settle by day 10 rather than carrying both costs.
Float reserve
Funding the balance in advance moves the fee to the funding moment rather than the settlement moment, which is useful because it makes the cost visible before you commit to a basket. Community-reported figures put wallet funding at about 2%, and our £120 order record was funded that way at a rate we noted on the funding date.
1. Fund an amount close to your expected spend rather than a round number. 2. Record the rate and the fee beside the funding date. 3. Spend the balance on goods and keep a fresh top-up for freight, so a stale rate only touches the smaller row.
Rank the three self-purchased settlements beside each other before deciding how a parcel gets funded, because the payable figure and the headline value rarely agree. 1. Measure the gap on the mid-sized record: £120 headed the file while £108.34 settled it, £11.66 lower (Recorded), with the carriage line working out at £5.26/kg across a 3.8 kg billable weight (Recorded). 2. Test the small record, where fixed blocks dominate: a £40 headline settled at £48.75 (Recorded), so the payable sat £8.75 above the headline, the £8.40 first weight covering nearly all of it and the residual £0.35 keeping the billable weight inside the 0.5–1 kg band (our arithmetic on Recorded figures). 3. Test the large record, where the goods figure governs: a £210 headline settled at £167.93, which is 20.0% below the headline (Recorded), so forecast from the goods line rather than from the declared value. Fund under about £50 from the balance, where a small credit is easiest to trace; fund a parcel with a live QC re-shoot through PayPal; fund a 10 kg or 11.5 kg parcel by card, since both price at £54.60 and one statement line then carries the band, the divisor and the pounds (Recorded). Where two routes land within £2.00 of each other on the same billable weight, take the one whose record you can rebuild from the statement, because a difference you cannot explain is worth less than a line you can cite.
2% opposed 4%
Two percentage points is the whole difference, and on the three baskets we settled it produced £2.16, £0.98 and £3.36 of avoidable cost, or £6.50 across the three. The same two points against a £600.00 basket would be £12.00, which is where the choice stops being a rounding matter and starts being a line in the budget.
1. Multiply the settled total by 0.02 and by 0.04 to get the two candidate fees. 2. Subtract the smaller from the larger. 3. If the difference is under £1.00, choose on convenience rather than on cost.
Three clearances
Check the arithmetic on real numbers rather than on examples. On the £108.34 settlement, a 2% funding route adds £2.17 and a 4% route adds £4.33. On the £48.75 settlement the same two routes add £0.98 and £1.95. On the £167.93 settlement they add £3.36 and £6.72. The ranking never changes, only the size of the gap.
1. Repeat the calculation for each settlement you make. 2. Keep the three results together so the pattern is visible rather than felt. 3. If a route ever quotes less than the 2% figure, check what has been left out before switching to it.
The data point behind this note
Across our three self-paid settlements of £108.34, £48.75 and £167.93, the gap between a community-reported 2% card route and a community-reported 4% intermediary route came to £6.50 in total (Recorded for the settlements, Community-reported for the percentages).
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.