Unified Carrier Intelligence: Finding the True Cost of Every Shipment
Platform: ClickHouse + Metabase
Start a Similar ProjectWhat We Were Solving
As financial controller for an apparel and consumer goods business processing 4,000–15,000 orders monthly, there was no unified view of actual shipping costs. Shopify tracked orders, ShipStation tracked labels, and three carriers — USPS, UPS, FedEx — each had their own billing formats, service tiers, reseller invoices, and payment cycles. Every platform spoke a different schema. There was no single answer to "what did that order actually cost to ship?" — let alone visibility into average shipping cost by weight, zone, or carrier service.
How We Built It
We built an ETL pipeline ingesting Shopify order data, ShipStation shipment records, and all carrier billing feeds — normalizing conflicting schemas, reconciling billing cycle differences, and loading everything into a unified ClickHouse warehouse. A Metabase dashboard surfaced true cost per order, average weight and items per order, cost by carrier and service level, and cost by destination zone. With full visibility in hand, a multi-carrier routing strategy was designed: matching each order to the cheapest carrier service for its zone, weight, and distance across USPS, UPS, FedEx, and their resellers.
What We Delivered
30–40%
Reduction in avg. shipping cost per order
4 carriers
Unified into one billing view (+ resellers)
15k/mo
Peak order volume
True cost
Per order, weight & zone — first time visible
Average order shipping cost dropped 30–40%. The business moved from a single-carrier default to an intelligent multi-carrier strategy driven entirely by real cost data. Ongoing monitoring lets the team track carrier rate changes and reoptimize routing as order volumes shift between seasons.
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