What is Dimweight?
Dimweight is the total space occupied by a package or a shipment compared to its actual weight. It is often called volumetric or dimensional weight, and companies use it to compute the shipping, freight, container, and courier charges. Metrics like the dimensions of a product along with its weight are required to calculate dimweight.
Significance of Dimweight in an E-commerce Shipping and Delivery
Dimweight allows a company to accurately price the cost of overall shipping using the standard computed value. It also provides freight carriers to sort and optimize storage systemically. Some of its benefits are:
- Storage optimization: Stacking products from multiple retailers might get cumbersome and messy without proper packaging. To make dimweight calculation easier, sellers have started using square boxes. Due to this ripple effect, a shipping company can optimize how they pack containers, as irregularly sized products are negated.
- Accurate pricing: The area enclosed by a product in a container greatly determines the shipping cost. Focusing on the total volume required by a particular product instead of its weight, accurate pricing is feasible.
Prerequisites of Dimweight and How It Works
To calculate the dimweight of a product, one needs to know its length, height, and breadth. Once all the metrics are gathered, a retailer can calculate the dimweight using the formula below.
Dimweight formula: (length X breadth X height) / dimensional factor
The divisor (dimensional factor) may vary as per the shipping company. It is always suggested to check in with your shipping company before calculating the dimweight.
Use Case with Dimweight
For example, a retailer wants to ship a product to the Philippines. The dimensions of the products are 10 ” X 10” X 10” with a weight of 10 kg. Therefore the dimweight was computed to be 1000 m3/dimensional factor. Based on dimweight, retailers can calculate their shipping costs.
