Many merchants set their shipping fee by checking what the courier service charges, adding a few hundred forints for packaging, and then rounding to an amount that feels “acceptable”. This may even work at launch, but over the longer term it can turn out that shipping is either driving too many customers away at checkout or quietly eating up the margin generated on your orders.
It goes without saying that the shipping fee is far more than a simple logistics line item. It influences whether the customer ultimately places the order, what value of cart they assemble, which delivery method they choose, and even whether they perceive your offer as competitive at all.
Shipping prices should not be derived solely from the courier company's rate table. It is far more useful to start from how much it actually costs to fulfill an order, how much margin remains on it, and how customer behavior changes under different shipping conditions.
The customer only cares about the final total
As a merchant, it is easy to separate the product price and the shipping fee, but in the customer's mind these two amounts often merge into a single question: how much do I have to pay in the end? This is especially important in price-sensitive product categories. It doesn't matter that a product is listed a few hundred forints cheaper in one webshop if, at the cart, it turns out that delivery costs twice as much as at the competitor. The initial price difference vanishes in an instant.
The Baymard Institute has been studying the causes of cart abandonment for years. According to their aggregated research, more than seventy percent of online carts are ultimately not completed with a purchase. Among the abandonments not stemming from simple browsing or window-shopping, one of the most common reasons is extra costs perceived as too high, including the shipping fee. In their 2025 research, 39 percent of respondents named this as a problem, and a further 21 percent did not buy because they judged the delivery too slow.
DHL's 2026 E-Commerce Trends study examined the experiences of nearly 29,000 online shoppers across 29 countries. 67 percent of respondents said they had previously abandoned a purchase because of shipping conditions that did not suit them. In the same study, free shipping proved to be one of the strongest incentives that would bring shoppers back to an abandoned order.
But it does not follow from this that every webshop should ship for free. Free shipping can work very well when it is backed by an adequate margin, cart value and a well-chosen threshold. The same solution at a merchant working with low margins, however, can easily lead to revenue growing while profit fails to follow.
Do you know exactly what a delivered order costs you?
Most merchants know the courier service's fee precisely, but far fewer can say what it costs them in total to send out a package. Because the two are nowhere near the same.
The fee on the shipping partner's invoice is only part of the cost that arises between the order coming in and the package being handed over. There is, for instance, the box or courier bag itself. You may need filler material, tape, labels, printing. Someone has to pick the product from the warehouse, check the order, pack it, and hand it to the courier. Certain payment methods carry separate costs, and handling cash on delivery can also cost money. And we haven't even mentioned failed deliveries.
If a few packages out of a hundred are not collected, their cost should not be treated as a series of isolated random events. From a business perspective, it is just as much part of the overall logistics model – simply in the form of an expected cost. Let's take a simple example...
The courier service delivers an average order for HUF 1,650. Packaging materials cost HUF 220. The average variable cost of assembling the package is HUF 300. And the loss arising from returned or uncollected packages can be estimated at a further HUF 130 per order on average.
In this example, the logistics cost of one order is not HUF 1,650 but approximately 2,300. If the webshop meanwhile shows a shipping fee of HUF 1,690 at checkout, then it is contributing roughly HUF 610 on average to the logistics of every order. That may well be a good decision – just make sure it is a conscious one.
Subsidizing shipping is not necessarily a loss
Many merchants' first reaction is that shipping must be passed on at least at cost. From an accounting standpoint this is an understandable approach, but from an e-commerce perspective it does not always produce the best result.
Suppose the actual cost of the package is HUF 2,290, but the customer pays only HUF 1,590 of it. At first glance, that is a loss of HUF 700. In reality, it is more accurate to say the merchant is subsidizing the creation of the order with HUF 700.
It is worth comparing this with what it costs to acquire a customer through advertising. A webshop can easily spend HUF 1,500, 2,500 or even several thousand forints just to get a new customer to a product page or to checkout. If, compared with that, a few hundred forints of shipping subsidy noticeably increases the purchase rate, we may well be talking about one of the cheapest conversion boosters there is. Provided, of course, that the order itself still generates an adequate margin.
Not every HUF 30,000 order is worth the same
Revenue gets far too much emphasis in many webshops, even though two orders with identical cart values can be completely different in financial terms. Take two HUF 30,000 carts: one contains high-margin beauty products, the other low-margin consumer electronics.
In analytics, both show up identically as HUF 30,000 of revenue. Yet the first order can easily absorb HUF 1,500–2,000 of shipping subsidy. On the second, the same amount may already consume a significant share of the profit.
A good shipping model therefore requires at least an approximate picture of how much profit is generated per order. Not every webshop needs to immediately implement an enterprise-grade controlling system. It already helps enormously to have a realistic estimate per product category or order type. Once you know this, you will look at free shipping with completely different eyes.
Don't set your free shipping threshold on a whim
In many webshops, the free shipping threshold comes about roughly like this: the competitor has HUF 20,000, so let's make ours 19,990. Free shipping only really makes sense when it encourages the customer to put somewhat more in the cart than they would otherwise spend.
Suppose the webshop's average order value is HUF 18,000, and the products carry an average margin of around 40 percent. The customer normally pays HUF 1,790 for shipping.
If you set the free shipping threshold at HUF 22,000, the typical customer has to increase their order by roughly HUF 4,000. At a forty percent margin, that means roughly HUF 1,600 of extra contribution. This is already close to the amount the merchant gives up by absorbing the shipping. The model is thus at least financially coherent.
If, on the other hand, free shipping kicked in at HUF 19,000, an average customer would only have to spend HUF 1,000 more. The margin on that would very likely come nowhere near compensating for waiving the entire shipping fee.
A free shipping threshold is therefore not good because many people reach it – it is good because it meaningfully changes the composition of the cart while the economics of the order do not deteriorate.
Average cart value can easily deceive you
Average order value is an important figure, but it must be used with caution. Suppose most orders in a webshop fall between HUF 10,000 and 15,000, but every week a few purchases of HUF 100,000–200,000 come in as well. The average cart value can then easily jump above HUF 25,000. Yet the majority of customers do not actually spend anywhere near HUF 25,000 – which is exactly why, when setting up free shipping, you should look at the median order value and the distribution itself.
From a practical standpoint, one of the most interesting questions is how many orders sit just below your planned free shipping threshold. If, for example, a strikingly large number of orders come in between HUF 17,000 and 19,000, then a HUF 20,000 limit really can move customers. But if the bulk of orders are HUF 8,000–11,000, a HUF 20,000 threshold will be so far away for most people that it appears not as an incentive but as an irrelevant condition.
The parcel locker is no longer a secondary delivery method
In Hungarian e-commerce, the role of pickup points and parcel lockers has fundamentally changed within a few years.
According to data published in 2025 by PwC and the Hungarian Digital Commerce Association, 61 percent of Hungarian e-commerce packages were delivered to homes in 2024, while the combined share of lockers and pickup points had already reached 30 percent.
By then, more than 8,500 fixed pickup points were operating in the country. According to the research, seven out of ten webshops offered some such delivery option, and 38 percent of customers explicitly preferred parcel locker pickup. This is not merely a logistics curiosity – it has serious significance for pricing too.
If the parcel locker is cheaper for you and convenient for the customer, there is no particular reason for it to cost the same as home delivery. In fact, it may be worth deliberately building in a price difference.
If, for example, the locker costs HUF 1,190 or 1,290 and home delivery HUF 1,790 or 1,890, the customer will decide for themselves whether the convenience is worth paying more for. Meanwhile, the merchant steers orders toward the cheaper delivery channel without having to force anything. The price simply does its job.
Not every product necessarily needs the same shipping
A book, a running shoe and a piece of garden furniture are three completely different products from a logistics standpoint, yet many webshops try to handle them with the same flat shipping fee. With a homogeneous product range, that is perfectly fine. But if your products vary significantly in weight, size or handling requirements, a flat fee will sooner or later distort things. There will be orders on which the webshop earns too much on shipping, and others where it pays in a substantial amount. That is why, with certain product ranges, it makes sense to use weight bands or cart-value-based tariffs.
For a light package, for example, the base fee may work, while at higher total weights the tariff can increase. Oversized or special products may even require a completely separate shipping method. The technical system, of course, has to be able to handle this.
Sellvio's shipping settings support multiple pricing logics. You can configure flat fees, weight-based or cart-value-based tariffs, as well as a free shipping threshold. B2C and B2B conditions can be managed separately, which matters because the logistics needs of the two sales models are often not the same at all.