UK ecommerce shipping fees in 2026, compared

Q: What do the EU and US changes mean for a UK seller?

The EU replaced its 150 euro duty exemption on 1 July 2026 with a flat 3 euro customs duty per tariff line until July 2028; VAT still goes through IOSS. The US ended its 800 dollar exemption on 29 August 2025, so every parcel there now pays duty, generally 10 percent on UK-made goods. Neither stops you selling: both mean accurate HS codes, the landed cost shown at checkout and delivered-duty-paid labels.

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🇬🇧 UK edition. Selling from elsewhere? Read the US, Australia or India version.

Shipping is the other cost every online shop pays on every order, and in the UK it is the one with the widest spread. The same 1 kg parcel is £4.70 over the Post Office counter, £3.75 through Royal Mail’s own website and £2.62 dropped at an Evri ParcelShop — and the same box to Berlin can arrive duty-paid or with a bill at the door. This is a plain comparison of what the main UK options cost in October 2026, the carriers and the platforms that sell their labels, written twice: once for shops that post within the UK, and once for shops that sell abroad.

The quick comparison

Published prices as of October 2026, VAT 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
Royal Mail Click & Drop	Free	Online prices below the counter for anyone with a free account (Tracked 48 small parcel £3.75 against £4.70 at the Post Office); unpublished account prices from around 1,000 parcels a year.	Small parcels; every UK postcode, no surcharges
Evri	Free	ParcelShop or locker drop-off £2.62 flat up to 5 kg (£3.20 next day); delivery-to-door and collection cost more; £20 cover included; Frequent Seller discounts from 40 parcels a month.	The lowest price per parcel on 1–5 kg
Parcel2Go, ParcelHero	Free, per parcel	Brokers reselling Evri, DPD, Royal Mail, UPS, DHL and Parcelforce at their own volume rates — a 10 kg tracked parcel at £5.39 with Evri against £8.60 booked with Royal Mail direct, in one 2026 comparison.	Occasional heavy or awkward parcels
Veeqo	Free	Amazon-owned. Pre-negotiated Amazon Shipping, Royal Mail, Evri, DPD and FedEx rates; inventory add-on from £17 a month including VAT.	Multi-channel and Amazon sellers
Easyship	Free → $29/mo	Free to 50 shipments a month. Royal Mail at up to 45% off retail with no business account, plus DPD, Evri, DHL Express, UPS and FedEx; duties and taxes quoted at checkout.	Selling abroad
Shippo	Free → $17/mo	Free to 30 labels a month. DPD UK (up to 20% off ParcelShop drop-off) and Evri drop-off discounts, DHL Express and UPS; Royal Mail not among its UK carriers at the time of writing.	Several carriers and an API
Sendcloud	Free → €28/mo	Free to 20 parcels a month on its own rates; Lite €28 plus €0.10 a label, Growth €87, Premium €175. 170+ carriers across eight European countries, the UK included.	Selling into Europe at volume
ShipStation	$14.99 → $349.99/mo	Billed in dollars by shipments: Starter $14.99 (50), Standard $29.99 (your own carrier accounts and the API), Premium $349.99. Royal Mail and DPD among its discounted carriers.	Volume, automation rules, teams
Shopify Shipping	Included	Evri and DPD labels bought inside Shopify, with Royal Mail, InPost and DHL Express Europe also listed as carriers; the discounts are not published.	Shopify stores only
Direct with the carrier	Free → contract	A Royal Mail business account (collections, account rates, returns), Evri’s Frequent Seller account, a DPD account for next-day with a one-hour window. Real discounts are negotiated on volume.	Established volume, your own contracts

Easyship, Shippo and ShipStation bill UK customers in US dollars; Sendcloud in euros. Royal Mail and Evri figures are the carriers’ own October 2026 price lists for personal and marketplace sellers.

Where the discount really comes from

Every platform advertises a percentage off, and every one of them is comparing against a price almost nobody who sells online pays: the Post Office counter. Four things actually move the price of a UK label:

Online beats the counter. Royal Mail runs two public price lists. Buy a Tracked 48 small parcel at the counter and it is £4.70; buy the same label on royalmail.com or through Click & Drop and it is £3.75. Nobody negotiated that; it is the price for printing your own label.
Drop-off beats collection. Evri’s cheapest rate, £2.62 for anything up to 5 kg, is for parcels you take to a ParcelShop or locker. The same parcel delivered to a door from a drop-off is £3.04–£4.79 depending on size, and a courier collection adds roughly a pound more.
Someone else’s contract. Veeqo, Easyship, Shippo and the brokers hold volume agreements and pass them through; this is where the real gaps between platforms are, and they move by weight, size and service. A Royal Mail business account does the same thing in your own name once you post enough — around a thousand parcels a year — with account prices that are quoted ex-VAT and carry Royal Mail’s fuel and energy surcharge, 16% since May 2026.
What the platform charges you. Veeqo and the brokers are paid by the carriers, so the software is free. Easyship, Shippo and Sendcloud are free up to a volume. ShipStation is paid software with discounted rates on top. Sendcloud is the one to watch: its paid plans add a per-label fee on top of the subscription.

The rule of thumb: compare on your parcel — your usual weight, box size and how much cover you need — not on the headline percentage. Every option here has a free price checker, and the cheapest one for a candle shop in Leeds is not the cheapest one for a bike-parts shop in Bristol.

What a 1 kg parcel actually costs

Take a 1 kg small parcel, the shoebox size most online shops post, going anywhere in the UK:

£4.70Royal Mail Tracked 48 at the Post Office counter

£3.75The same label bought online through Click & Drop

£2.62Evri, dropped at a ParcelShop or locker (£20 cover)

Those three numbers are a fair map of the whole market. Royal Mail costs more and gives you every UK postcode at one price, no remote-area charges and more cover; Evri costs less and asks you to carry the parcel to a shop and accept £20 of cover unless you pay for more. Above 5 kg the brokers take over: the 10 kg tracked parcel that is £8.60 booked with Royal Mail direct was £5.39 with Evri or £6.45 with DPD through Parcel2Go in one February 2026 comparison.

They are also moving targets. Royal Mail raised parcel prices on 5 October 2026: at the counter a Tracked 48 small parcel went from £4.45 to £4.70 and Tracked 24 from £5.70 to £6.05, while medium parcels rose by up to £1.40; online, Tracked 48 moved from £3.65 to £3.75. The fuel and energy surcharge on business-account parcels went from 11% to 16% in May. Evri’s next-day services are not available everywhere and some postcodes carry a £2.75 location charge. The label you buy this autumn costs more than the one you bought in the spring, whoever prints it.

If you sell within the UK

Most UK shops post most of their parcels domestically, under 2 kg, to home addresses. For that profile the decision is about volume and how much cover and software you want around the label:

Up to a few hundred orders a month

Royal Mail Click & Drop is the default answer: free, £3.75 Tracked 48 for a small parcel, every postcode, tracking your customers already trust, and it imports orders from most platforms.
Evri ParcelShop when £20 cover is enough and you pass a shop anyway — £2.62 up to 5 kg is the lowest price in the country.
Parcel2Go or ParcelHero for the occasional heavy or awkward parcel, where the broker rate on Evri or DPD beats everything else.
Veeqo if you also sell on Amazon, eBay or Etsy and want one stock count — free, with Royal Mail, Evri and DPD rates in one screen.

Hundreds to thousands a month

A Royal Mail business account once you post around a thousand parcels a year: account prices, daily collections and tracked returns through the same Click & Drop you already use.
Evri Frequent Seller (40+ parcels a month) or a DPD account for next-day with the one-hour window customers rate.
ShipStation or Easyship once you need automation rules, several users and your own carrier accounts beside the platform rates; at 500 labels a month a $29.99 plan is about 5p a label — irrelevant next to a 50p rate difference, so judge the software on features. Sendcloud’s per-label fee makes the same sum worth doing before you commit.

Two platform notes. Shopify Shipping in the UK is a convenience rather than a rate card — Evri and DPD labels without leaving the order screen, at discounts Shopify does not publish — and it only exists on Shopify. And whichever route you take, buy nothing at the counter: the Post Office price is the one every other number on this page is measured against.

If you sell abroad

Since Brexit every parcel to the EU is an export, which puts UK shops in the same position as American ones when they sell to Europe, and the United States has just become harder for everyone. 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.

The label. Royal Mail International Tracked bought online is the benchmark: about £17.53 for 1 kg to the USA and £20.20 for 2 kg, against £29.55 for the same 1 kg at the Post Office; roughly £12–£16 for 1–2 kg into Europe. Express is cheaper than its reputation when bought through a platform: Easyship, Shippo and the brokers quote DHL Express, UPS and FedEx at discounts the carriers will not give a new account, and they arrive in days rather than weeks.
Who pays the duty. “Delivered duty unpaid” (DDU) — which is what Royal Mail International Tracked is — means the carrier bills your customer at the door, usually with a handling fee on top, and refused parcels come back at your cost. “Delivered duty paid” (DDP) means you quote and collect the duties and taxes at checkout and the carrier clears the parcel. Royal Mail’s Postal Delivered Duty Paid option, DPD and Evri’s international services, and DHL Express through Easyship or Shippo all do DDP; it costs a little more per label and converts far better.
Paperwork. Every platform fills in the customs data from your order, but only if your products carry a commodity (HS) code and a country of origin. Set those once on the product and the declarations take care of themselves; leave them blank and parcels stall at the border.

For selling abroad the order of choice flips: Easyship first for the duties and the courier choice with Royal Mail still in the mix, Sendcloud for European volume, Royal Mail Click & Drop with its duty-paid option for light parcels, the brokers for one-offs, and a direct DHL Express account once you send enough to negotiate — usually well over a hundred international parcels a month.

Duties and taxes in 2026: what changed

This is the part of the comparison that is new this year, and for a UK shop it matters more than any rate difference between platforms:

European Union. The €150 duty exemption ended on 1 July 2026. Until the full tariff arrives on 1 July 2028, low-value parcels pay an interim flat €3 customs duty per tariff line (per HS6 code, not per parcel — three product types in one box is €9). VAT is unchanged: still collected through the Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS) at checkout for consignments up to €150, which most UK shops registered for in 2021. A separate EU handling fee of around €2 a parcel is expected from November 2026. Practical upshot: accurate HS codes, keep the IOSS registration, and ship DDP.
United States. The $800 duty-free de minimis ended on 29 August 2025, so every parcel into the US now pays duty — generally 10% on UK-made goods under the UK–US arrangement, more for some categories — plus the carrier’s clearance fee. Royal Mail paused US parcels for a few days that week and resumed with its duty-paid option; the transitional flat fee on postal parcels has since ended, so a DDU label to America now means a bill at the customer’s door every time. Quote the landed cost or send DDP.
Everywhere else. Canada taxes most postal parcels above CAD 20; Australia charges 10% GST on goods up to AUD 1,000 and makes you collect it at checkout once you sell more than AUD 75,000 a year there; Switzerland and Norway were never in the EU scheme and have their own thresholds. Your platform’s landed-cost quote is the cheapest way to get these right.
Coming into the UK. Nothing has changed yet for returns and stock you import: goods of £135 or less are still duty-free with VAT charged at the point of sale. HMRC confirmed in July 2026 that the £135 relief will go, by October 2028 at the latest.

Fees aren't the only cost

Cover. Evri includes £20 and sells upgrades to £999; Royal Mail’s tracked services include more as standard and the brokers sell protection per parcel, sometimes at a steep price for valuable items. On a £120 order the difference between £20 and real cover is the whole margin.
Collection or drop-off. A courier collection costs about a pound more than a drop-off on Evri, and Royal Mail business accounts price collections into the contract. Factor in the trip to the shop or the Post Office.
Size, not just weight. Royal Mail prices by format (large letter, small parcel, medium parcel) as well as weight, so a box 1 cm too deep moves up a band; couriers charge volumetric weight on large light boxes. Right-sizing packaging is the cheapest optimisation there is.
Surcharges. Couriers add remote-area charges for the Highlands, islands and some postcodes (Evri’s is £2.75); Royal Mail has none, which is why it keeps winning for shops with customers everywhere.
VAT. Consumer prices include it; account prices are quoted without it. If you are VAT-registered, compare ex-VAT like for like and reclaim it.
Returns. Tracked Returns on a Royal Mail account and printless returns through Evri’s ParcelShops are standard; turning returns on changes how much cover and label budget you need.
Your time. Software that saves an hour a day on rules, batch printing and stock pays for itself on the first morning. That, not the rate, is what the paid tiers are really selling.

Why owning your store changes it

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 the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, named for Royal Mail services — and the label providers sit under Connections: Royal Mail, DHL Express, Veeqo, Shippo and EasyPost for UK sellers, with Australia Post, Shippit, Starshipit and others for the Australian and Indian editions. Digital products skip delivery altogether. Nothing adds a per-order fee, and nothing stops you moving from Click & Drop to a business account to Easyship as the volume grows, because the store never belonged to the label company.

So which is cheapest?

As with payment fees, there is no single winner — only the right fit:

Small parcels, lowest effort, every postcode: Royal Mail Click & Drop online.
Lowest price on 1–5 kg when £20 cover will do: Evri ParcelShop.
Heavy or awkward one-offs: Parcel2Go or ParcelHero.
Free, with stock across channels: Veeqo.
Selling abroad, duties handled: Easyship.
European volume: Sendcloud, once you have done the per-label sum.
Volume, automation, your own contracts: a Royal Mail business account, with ShipStation or Veeqo on top.
Already on Shopify: Shopify Shipping, until a price check on your own parcels says otherwise.

For a UK shop in 2026 the cheapest label is Royal Mail bought online for the parcels that need cover and reach, Evri dropped at a shop for the ones that do not, 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 UK ecommerce payment processing fees in 2026, compared. New to all this? Start with our guide to setting up your Claude ecommerce website.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest way for a small UK shop to send parcels in 2026?

For parcels up to 5 kg, Evri dropped at a ParcelShop or locker is the lowest price in the country at £2.62, with £20 of cover. For parcels that need more cover or go to remote postcodes, Royal Mail Tracked 48 bought online through Click & Drop at £3.75 for a small parcel — never the £4.70 counter price. Above 5 kg, a broker such as Parcel2Go usually wins.

Do I need a Royal Mail business account to get cheaper postage?

No. Anyone with a free Royal Mail account gets the online prices, which are below the counter, and marketplace sellers use the same Click & Drop. A business account makes sense from around a thousand parcels a year: account prices, daily collections and tracked returns, quoted ex-VAT with a fuel and energy surcharge on top.

What is the cheapest way to ship abroad from the UK?

For light parcels, Royal Mail International Tracked bought online — about £17.53 for 1 kg to the USA against £29.55 at the counter — ideally with the duty-paid option so the customer is not billed at the door. For heavier or time-sensitive goods, DHL Express, UPS or FedEx through Easyship or Shippo is often far below list price and arrives in days. Since 1 July 2026 the EU charges duty on every parcel and since August 2025 so does the US, so quote duties and taxes at checkout.

What do the EU and US changes mean for a UK seller?

The EU replaced its €150 duty exemption on 1 July 2026 with a flat €3 customs duty per tariff line until July 2028; VAT still goes through IOSS. The US ended its $800 exemption on 29 August 2025, so every parcel there now pays duty, generally 10% on UK-made goods. Neither stops you selling — both mean accurate HS codes, the landed cost shown at checkout and delivered-duty-paid labels.

Where the numbers come from (checked 16 October 2026): Royal Mail’s online and Post Office price guides valid from 5 October 2026; Evri’s price list; the published pricing pages of Veeqo UK, Sendcloud, ShipStation and Shippo; Easyship’s Royal Mail rates announcement (February 2026); the Parcel2Go price comparison published in February 2026; the EU customs reform notices from FedEx and DHL; HMRC’s Reforming customs rules for low value imports (13 July 2026); and the US Executive Order ending de minimis from 29 August 2025. Prices move during the year — always run your own parcel through a live price checker before deciding.

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