Dimensional Weight Solutions
If you need boating supplies, Wholesale Marine has them. An online retailer since 2006, Wholesale Marine embraces the motto “We are boaters.” Staff members at Wholesale Marine are passionate boaters themselves, which allows them to provide their customers with the best service and highest quality products from real-world boating experience. Wholesale Marine offers it all, from small O-ring parts to complete pontoon packages. Most of their products are individually packaged and shipped, resulting in a huge range of parcel sizes and weights (think boat seats and fishing accessories all the way to stainless steel, sea-faring anchors). With nationwide distribution and the best prices for high-quality products, Wholesale Marine stocks approximately 20,000 different SKUs and can ship more than 2,000 items in a single day during the peak of summer.
How does an online retailer stock and ship this enormous amount of products? Efficiency. Rows upon rows of neatly stocked shelves fill Wholesale Marine’s distribution warehouse in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the immense product offering is obvious when walking from one end of the building to the other. With e-commerce and fast shipping speeds becoming an expectation, and not just a luxury, Wholesale Marine has always held up their promise of great service and great prices. However, when large postal carriers started making changes to billable weight processes, Wholesale Marine felt the consequences.
Prior to dimensional weight (also called dim weight) shipping, Wholesale Marine shipped products exclusively on actual package weight. But when carriers enacted dim weight to better maximize capacity, businesses like Wholesale Marine became susceptible to fees and back charges from miscalculated dimensions and freight compliance issues.
“Dimensional weight was really hurting us,” says Wholesale Marine owner Jim Stewart. “We were doing a manual product sort and grouping with what we thought was the cheapest shipping. We looked at an order and would say, ‘This is probably small enough for this type of shipping,’ but we weren’t capturing the dimensions.” Frustrating dimensional shipping experiences and extra fees convinced Stewart to find a better way of shipping product.
For dimensional weight billing, having acurate cubic dimensions is key. Dim weight reflects a package’s density—in essence, the amount of space the package utilizes in relation to its weight. To determine dim weight, a package’s length, width and height are multiplied, and then divided by 166 for domestic shipments or 139 for international shipments. Carriers then charge shipping based on either the package’s actual weight or dimensional weight—whichever is greater.
