For those of you who ship UPS, under the guise of fuel surcharges monthly billing is way more than the individual program rates. Have any of you seen this recent upcharge/ discrepancy??

I'm not saying gas isn't more these days. I'm saying UPS is charging more on every shipment than program shows and more than what receipt print-out says. How can that be ethical? Adjusted prices are sometimes 20-40% more, so we are losing substantial dollars. Are we missing something? Any words of wisdom here?

If you have a business you should set up an account for discounts. I have an account but found Pirate Ship is even less expensive than my account.

https://ship.pirateship.com/

Depending on how much you ship, you can negotiate with UPS to get better rates. Then after a year and a half, have FedEx bid you. Pit FedEx and UPS against each other.
At work, we ship a lot. A little over 100,000 packages a year. Almost all of them ship ground. We have some pretty incredible ground discounts. Talk to A UPS rep about it. They will discount you.

noticed it for a good while, but usually only a few dollars,

and yes, if you do not have an account, create one, (sounds like you already do)


my rep called me a while back and wanted me to switch to UPS exclusively, but a large part of my business can go first class, as in under a pound, or is cheaper to go USPS Priority so it would not work out for me,

Like Anush said, pirateShip.com

lots of shipping platforms (pirate ship, shipstation, etc) offer shipping discounts way more significant than even people with corporate accounts.

I have both the shipstation and UPS accounts, and I don't recall the last time I've sent anything using my own account when shipstation rates are consistently 1/3 the cost.

If you ship regularly this is what you should do.

Thanks for the replies. However I was trying to point out that the monthly billing was significantly higher than individual receipt created by their program day of. Why wouldn't the quoted and saved receipt match??

Fictitious example ... XYZ package 4 lbs zone 3 = $7.50, so that is quoted to customer.

account billing comes and XYZ fuel surcharge makes previous charge $11. What is missing that the correct shipping price wasn't shown?

quote:

Originally posted by preten2b:
For those of you who ship UPS, under the guise of fuel surcharges monthly billing is way more than the individual program rates. Have any of you seen this recent upcharge/ discrepancy??

I'm not saying gas isn't more these days. I'm saying UPS is charging more on every shipment than program shows and more than what receipt print-out says. How can that be ethical? Adjusted prices are sometimes 20-40% more, so we are losing substantial dollars. Are we missing something? Any words of wisdom here?

I worked for a Fortune 500 company that shipped tens of thousands of packages a week using UPS across 30 + divisions.
Thousands of dollars was being lost weekly at some divisions because of the cryptic nature of the UPS .csv invoices. Local accounting folks would try to sift though these 250 field header-less .csv files and try matching the shipments/additional charges to a customer. As you know, this can be a time consuming process. We had other report options but they lacked the details we needed. I was asked to come up with a programming solution.
I ended up writing software where our accounting/overseas folks would download the weekly USP invoices for each division and drop them into a hot folder that would automatically upload each invoice into a SQL database. Once uploaded, the tracking numbers for each package was compared to the tracking numbers from the corporate distribution database. From this information, we were able to get all the customer information for each unique package within a shipment. From there, the application would automatically create Additional charge/Fuel surcharge/Address Correction/Residential Adjustment/etc. reports in Excel or .PDF format for the accounting folks to bill back to the customers. A process that was taking hours/days was shortened down to minutes.
We were able to spot issues, trends, etc. quickly.


Here are some of the additional charges

ChargeDescription Catagory
WW Expedited Additional
Disbursement Fee Additional
Value Added Tax Additional
Ground Additional
Brokerage GST Additional
Entry Prep Fee Additional
Customs Gst Additional
Duty Amount Additional
Shipping Charge Correction 2nd Day Air A.M. Additional
Address Correction Additional
Address Correction Expedited Additional
Address Correction Ground Additional
Chargeback Chargeback Surcharge Additional
Chargeback Fuel Surcharge Additional
Delivery Area Surcharge Additional
Delivery Area Surcharge - Extended Additional
Duty and Tax Forwarding Surcharge Additional
Extended Area Surcharge Additional
Fuel Surcharge Additional
Ground Undeliverable Return Additional
Not Previously Billed Delivery Area Surcharge - Extended Additional
Not Previously Billed Fuel Surcharge Additional
Residential Adjustment Additional
Residential Surcharge Additional
Returns Delivery Area Surcharge - Extended Additional
Returns Fuel Surcharge Additional
Returns Ground Additional
Service Charge Additional
Shipping Charge Correction Additional Handling Additional
Shipping Charge Correction Fuel Surcharge Additional
Shipping Charge Correction Ground Additional
Shipping Charge Correction Large Package Surcharge Additional

I hate that shit. I don’t necessarily care what the price is, but if you tell me a price I expect to get charged that price. Include all your fuel surcharges and whatever other crap you want to charge and tell me this is the price to ship it.