In India’s fast-evolving Ecommerce ecosystem, shipping has become a decisive driver of profitability. Customer expectations are higher than ever, delivery timelines are shrinking, and margins are under constant pressure. While sellers focus on reach, speed, and returns, one operational issue continues to quietly erode profits: weight discrepancy.
Unlike visible costs such as freight rates or RTO charges, weight discrepancy surfaces much later in the order lifecycle. In most cases, sellers are informed weeks after delivery, when courier invoices are reconciled. By then, the order is closed, revenue has been booked, and any additional charges directly hit margins. This delayed visibility is both difficult to predict and easy to underestimate.
What Is Weight Discrepancy?
Weight discrepancy refers to an issue arising between a seller and the courier company for the attributed weight of the package. Shipping charges are calculated on the higher of dead weight (actual weight) or volumetric weight, which is based on package dimensions. Any excess recorded by the courier is billed retrospectively.
Discrepancies often stem from volumetric weight rather than actual product weight. Common causes include incorrect declarations, non-standard box sizes, or inconsistent packaging such as envelopes, courier bags(flyers), which can distort dimensions during automated scans.
Discrepancies may also arise at courier hubs due to variations in scanning equipment, calibration gaps, or manual interference. Together, these factors make accurate packaging and measurement essential to controlling discrepancy-related costs.
Why Weight Discrepancy Becomes a Silent Margin Killer
For sellers, weight discrepancy is more than a billing adjustment; it introduces financial uncertainty and operational friction. This is especially problematic because these charges surface, once orders are closed and revenue is booked. These costs bypass pricing logic entirely and directly erode margins, leaving sellers with little scope for corrective action.
Dispute resolution is another challenge. Redressal typically requires shipment images showing labels, scale readings, and dimensions. In most cases, the shipment has already reached the customer, making it difficult to gather accurate proof.
Above all, sellers lack preventive guardrails. Without systems that validate weights and dimensions before pickup, discrepancy management becomes reactive rather than predictable.
How is Shiprocket solving the problem?
Shiprocket approaches weight discrepancy as a structural logistics issue rather than an isolated courier error, focusing on prevention, validation, and simplified resolution.
Prevention starts before dispatch. Sellers can freeze dead weight and volumetric weight at the SKU level for single-quantity shipments, reducing accidental misdeclaration and ensuring consistency across orders.
Since volumetric issues account for most discrepancies, Shiprocket also allows sellers to declare packaging details in advance. In practice, sellers tend to use fewer than three box types across the majority of their shipments. By freezing volumetric weight at the box level, dimension-related surprises during courier measurement are significantly reduced.
Dedicated data teams monitor shipment patterns to identify discrepancy-prone SKUs or sellers and enrol them into targeted improvement programs such as weight assurance, box-level freezing, or catalog enrichment.
Historical data adds another layer of protection. AI-driven models flag anomalous measurements and seek exemptions from couriers. For instance, if a product has consistently been billed at one kilogram, a sudden one-off higher charge is ignored.
Category-based maximum weight caps further prevent extreme billing errors - such as multi-kilogram charges on lightweight apparel shipments.
Shiprocket also mandates image proofs from couriers for every discrepancy. These are validated using AI, and proofs are rejected if unrelated objects appear in the frame or if visible measurements do not align with the claimed weight.
All checks are applied before discrepancies reach sellers. As a result, while couriers raise discrepancies on roughly 28 percent of shipments, fewer than 13 percent are ultimately passed on to merchants.
When discrepancies do occur, transparency is prioritised. Sellers see a clear breakdown on their dashboard, showing courier-claimed versus charged weight, along with dead and volumetric details. Notifications are sent via email and WhatsApp, and sellers have seven days to accept or dispute the charge, with escalation support available if needed.
The results are tangible. Today, only about four percent of validated discrepancies are disputed by sellers, down from over 32 percent three years ago.
A Clearer Path to Cost Control
Weight discrepancy is not a cost sellers have to live with - it is a symptom of weak upstream controls and fragmented validation across the logistics chain.
As Ecommerce scales, tolerance for such leakage disappears. Sellers who fail to bring predictability to shipping costs risk compounding margin erosion with every order shipped.
In an environment where profitability is defined by operational discipline, controlling weight discrepancy is no longer an optimisation lever, it is a prerequisite for sustainable growth.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content