Five things stack up: the shipping rate card for the destination zone and the parcel's weight or size, pick and pack, the packaging itself, the packaging EPR fee on the materials in it, and the cost of processing a return if one comes back.
It is charged per parcel rather than per order, which matters the moment an order ships in two boxes: the second box carries its own label, its own picking and its own packaging, and a per-order average quietly hides that. Averaging per order also flatters split-shipment merchants in any comparison, which is why nouz prices parcels first and only then sums them into the day.
On the example store the calculators use, the stack comes to €6,40 on a typical parcel: the zone-and-weight rate, the picker's minute, the box, and a few cents of EPR. Against an €85 basket that is 7,5% of net revenue; against a €30 basket the identical parcel would be over 21%, which is the whole story of why small baskets hurt. Those cents are carried in fractions until the day is summed, for the reason told in the rounding drift.
Because most of it is fixed per order, it is the cost that punishes small baskets hardest, and the first place to look when CM2 slips while CM1 holds. The levers are unglamorous and real: renegotiated weight brackets, a lighter box, a free-shipping threshold that nudges baskets over the next step. None of them shows up in an ad dashboard, which is why this line quietly separates stores that look identical on revenue.
The newest of the five is the one most merchants have not costed yet: what packaging EPR cost per parcel adds, by destination market and by material. It arrives as cents, and cents per parcel at volume is how logistics costs always arrive. A levy charged on every parcel, such as Austria's parcel tax, arrives the same way and stacks on the rate card.
