MyPost Business, eParcel, the franchise couriers, the brokers, Shippit, Starshipit, ShipStation, Easyship or Shopify Shipping — what each really costs to put a label on a parcel, where the discount actually comes from, and a separate answer for stores that sell overseas.
🇦🇺 Australia edition. Selling from elsewhere? Read the US, UK or India version.
Shipping is the other cost every online store pays on every order, and in Australia it is the one shaped by distance. The same 1 kg parcel is $16.00 over the Post Office counter, $12.80 interstate or $9.60 across town once a MyPost Business account reaches its top band, and about $10.45 as a courier franchise satchel from the Gold Coast to Sydney — and the same box to Auckland can arrive with the GST settled or with a bill at the door. This is a plain comparison of what the main Australian options cost in October 2026, the carriers and the platforms that sell their labels, written twice: once for stores that ship within Australia, and once for stores that sell overseas. One thing has changed since last year: Sendle, the cheapest name on most of these lists, stopped taking parcels in January 2026.
Published prices as of October 2026, GST included where the carrier includes it. Postage is always extra and always changes, so treat the right-hand columns as the shape of each offer rather than a quote:
| Option | Software cost | Carriers and discounts | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia Post MyPost Business | Free | Retail Parcel Post prices to start ($16.00 for 1 kg to any address in Australia, tracking and $100 cover included), then 10% to 40% off same-city and 5% to 20% off interstate as your spend over the last four weeks climbs through five bands. No fuel surcharge; pickups $15.60 each. | Small parcels; every postcode at one price |
| Australia Post eParcel contract | Contract | From about 2,000 parcels a year or $3,000 of international postage: negotiated rates quoted ex GST with a fuel surcharge on top (19.5% since 1 June 2026), daily collections, returns and the business API. | Volume, your own contract |
| Aramex, CouriersPlease | Free, prepaid | Franchise couriers selling prepaid satchels and coupons priced by lane and spend level. Aramex’s 2026 Gold Coast guide lists a 1 kg satchel to Sydney at $9.50 ex GST ($10.45 with it), $7.60 once you spend $1,000 a month; CouriersPlease sells its 1, 3 and 5 kg satchels through your local courier and publishes no prices. | Regular metro-to-metro lanes |
| Transdirect, Interparcel | Free, per parcel | Brokers reselling Aramex, CouriersPlease, TNT, Allied, Toll and others at their own volume rates. Transdirect advertises a 5 kg satchel anywhere in Australia from $6.32 and 10 kg Melbourne to Sydney from $11.19; Interparcel from $6.95 across 14 couriers. | Heavy, bulky or occasional parcels |
| Shippit | Free → $999/mo ex GST | Lite is free for up to 1,000 bookings a month on one carrier, with a 75-cent fee per booking on your own carrier rates; Plus $499 (up to five carriers), Pro $999. Pooled rates across Australia Post, Aramex, CouriersPlease, TNT and more; transit protection from $1 a delivery. | Several carriers at volume |
| Starshipit | $45 → $495/mo | Starter $45 a month on an annual plan ($50 monthly) for 100 shipments and two couriers; Professional $180 for 1,000; Enterprise $495 for 10,000; 10–15 cents a label past the allowance. You bring your own carrier accounts and rates — MyPost Business, eParcel, Aramex, DHL. | Automation on your own accounts |
| ShipStation | $22 → $1,628/mo inc GST | Starter $22 (50 shipments) to $319 (5,000); Standard from $55 adds your own carrier accounts and the API; Premium from $594. Discounted Australia Post, Aramex and CouriersPlease rates, the percentages unpublished. | Marketplaces, rules, teams |
| Easyship | Free → $145/mo + GST | Free to 50 shipments a month; Plus $45, Premier $95, Scale $145, plus GST. Australia Post, DHL Express, UPS, FedEx, TNT and CouriersPlease at Easyship’s rates, with duties and taxes quoted at checkout. | Selling overseas |
| Shopify Shipping | Included | Australia Post labels only, bought through your own MyPost Business account (eParcel accounts are not supported). The “save up to 40%” is MyPost’s own band saving, not a Shopify rate. | Shopify stores only |
| Sendle | — | Stopped taking parcels on 11 January 2026 and went into liquidation in February. The brand changed hands in July 2026 and its website says a relaunch is “almost here”; it was not taking bookings when this was written. | Nothing yet |
Easyship’s plan prices are in Australian dollars plus GST, Shippit’s exclude GST and ShipStation’s include it. Australia Post figures are the carrier’s own price guides for 1 July 2026.
Every platform advertises a percentage off, and the percentage is usually Australia Post’s own. Four things actually move the price of an Australian label:
The rule of thumb: compare on your parcel — your usual weight, box size and lanes — not on the headline percentage. Australia Post charges the greater of actual and cubic weight (length × width × height in metres × 250), so a 40 × 30 × 20 cm box of cushions weighs 1 kg on the scale and 6 kg to Australia Post. Every option here has a free rate checker, and the cheapest one for a candle maker in Fitzroy is not the cheapest one for a bike-parts store in Townsville.
Take a 1 kg parcel, the shoebox size most online stores send, going to a home address:
Those three numbers are a fair map of the whole market. Australia Post costs more at the door and gives you every address in the country at one price, tracking and $100 of cover; the bands bring it down fastest on the lanes that are cheapest to serve anyway. The franchise couriers cost less on the busy metro lanes they are built for, with cover and coverage to match, and price by lane and spend. Above 5 kg the brokers take over: Australia Post adds a distance charge per kilo on top of the $24.45 five-kilo price, which is why Transdirect can advertise 10 kg from Melbourne to Sydney at $11.19.
They are also moving targets. Australia Post raised Parcel Post and Express Post by an average of 4.95% on 1 July 2026 — a 1 kg Parcel Post became $16.00, a 500 g one $11.70 — and pickup fees by 9.7%, while the fuel surcharge on contract parcels was lifted twice in the spring. Sendle’s exit in January removed the sub-$8 national price that thousands of small stores had built their shipping around. And the franchise couriers’ prices are per franchise and per sheet: the Gold Coast guide quoted above is dated 24 April 2026 and the Northern Rivers one a year earlier. The label you buy this spring costs more than the one you bought last spring, whoever prints it.
Most Australian stores send most of their parcels domestically, under 3 kg, to home addresses, and a good share of those go interstate. For that profile the decision is about volume, lanes and how much cover and software you want around the label:
Two notes. Pickups are not free with MyPost Business — $15.60 a time, $13.39 at Bands 4 and 5, up to 100 parcels per pickup, in metro areas only — so a daily collection of ten parcels adds $1.56 to each of them, while a weekly one of a hundred adds 16 cents; batch the run or drop at the Post Office. And keep an eye on Sendle: if it relaunches with published national prices below Band 5, the small-parcel sum changes again.
Australian stores that sell abroad mostly sell to New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom, in that order, and each has changed its import rules in the last eighteen months. International shipping has three costs — the label, the duties and taxes at the destination, and the time you spend on customs paperwork and problem parcels — and the options differ far more here than on domestic labels.
For selling overseas the order of choice flips: MyPost Business International Standard for New Zealand and for light parcels anywhere, Easyship for the United States, the UK and Europe with duties quoted and the courier choice, the brokers for heavy one-offs, and a direct DHL Express account once you send enough to negotiate — usually well over a hundred international parcels a month.
This is the part of the comparison that is new, and for an Australian store selling abroad it matters more than any rate difference between platforms:
On a hosted platform your shipping lives inside someone else’s app store: switching label providers means a new app, a new fee and often a re-done checkout. On a store you own, the provider is a key you store once and change when a better rate comes along. In Claude CMS the shipping zones and rates live in your account under Shop → Shipping — with one-press setups for Australia, New Zealand and the rest of the world, at placeholder rates you edit — and the label providers sit under Connections: Australia Post and StarTrack for eParcel contracts, Shippit, Starshipit, Aramex and DHL Express. Digital products skip delivery altogether. Nothing adds a per-order fee, and nothing stops you moving from MyPost Business to an eParcel contract to Shippit as the volume grows, because the store never belonged to the label company.
As with payment fees, there is no single winner — only the right fit:
For an Australian store in 2026 the cheapest label is Australia Post through a MyPost Business account for the parcels that need cover and reach, a franchise courier satchel for the busy metro lanes, and a broker for anything heavy — printed by whichever free platform fits how you work. Spend the money you save on the thing that actually loses customers abroad: a checkout that shows the real delivery cost, duties included, before they press pay.
Counting the other cost on every order? Read Australia ecommerce payment processing fees in 2026, compared. New to all this? Start with our guide to setting up your Claude ecommerce website.
For most stores, Australia Post through a free MyPost Business account: a 1 kg parcel is $16.00 at retail and falls to $12.00 across town and $14.08 interstate once you have spent $250 in four weeks, and to $9.60 and $12.80 at the top band — tracked, with $100 cover and one price to every postcode. On regular metro lanes a franchise courier is cheaper: Aramex’s 2026 Gold Coast price guide lists a 1 kg satchel to Sydney at $10.45 including GST. Anything over 5 kg usually goes cheapest through a broker such as Transdirect or Interparcel.
No. MyPost Business has no minimum volume and gives up to 40% off same-city and 20% off interstate on spend alone, with no fuel surcharge. An eParcel contract starts at around 2,000 parcels a year: negotiated rates quoted ex GST, daily collections and returns, plus a fuel surcharge that reached 19.5% in June 2026 — so compare the quote with Band 5 before you sign.
For light parcels, Australia Post International Standard through MyPost Business: 1 kg to New Zealand is $29.00 at retail and $18.85 at Band 5, to the USA $43.60 and $33.79, to the UK $49.90 and $38.67, tracked with $100 cover. For heavier or urgent orders, DHL Express, UPS or FedEx through Easyship or Interparcel is usually well below list price and arrives in days. Since 2025 every parcel to the US pays duty and since 1 July 2026 so does every parcel to the EU, so quote duties and taxes at checkout.
Sendle stopped taking parcels on 11 January 2026 and went into liquidation the following month. Shopify removed it as a carrier, and Australian Shopify stores now buy Australia Post labels through their own MyPost Business account. A new owner bought the Sendle brand in July 2026 and says a relaunch is coming; until it is taking bookings and publishing prices, plan without it.
Where the numbers come from (checked 16 October 2026): Australia Post’s Post charges guide (1 September 2026), MyPost Business Rates and Savings Guide (July 2026), International Post Charges Easy Guide (1 July 2026) and 1 July 2026 pricing update; Aramex’s Gold Coast pricing guide (effective 24 April 2026); Shopify’s help pages on Australia Post and Sendle; the published pricing pages of Shippit, Starshipit, ShipStation Australia, Easyship, Transdirect and Interparcel; the USTR Section 301 action of 23 July 2026 and US Customs’ de minimis notices; the European Commission’s €3 customs duty guidance; HMRC’s Reforming customs rules for low value imports (13 July 2026); and the ATO’s guidance on GST-free exports. Prices move during the year — always run your own parcel through a live rate checker before deciding.