Pricing Delivery for Three Zones Without Losing Money

On Midmart the delivery charge is yours to set, per zone, per shop. Nobody pools your parcels and nobody subsidises them, which is freedom and responsibility in the same sentence. Sellers arriving from platforms that handled logistics tend to make the same three mistakes in the first month. Here is how to avoid them.

Start from your actual courier invoice

Not from what other shops display. Take your last month of dispatches and work out what you truly paid per parcel, including the parts that are easy to forget: return-to-sender charges on refused deliveries, cash-collection fees, packaging materials, and the trip to the courier point. Divide by parcels sent. That is your floor.

Price the three zones separately, because they cost differently

• Inside Dhaka — the cheapest leg, often same or next day. Most sellers land here between ৳60 and ৳100.
• Outside Dhaka City — other cities across the country; usually one to two days more and meaningfully dearer per parcel.
• Suburban & Rural — the last leg is where couriers spend the most, and it is where an underpriced rate quietly eats your margin. Price it honestly rather than optimistically.

Weight matters too. If you sell both a phone case and a rice cooker, a single flat rate is either overcharging one buyer or losing money on the other. Set your rates around what you actually ship most, and price the outliers into the product.

Use the free-delivery threshold deliberately

A free-delivery threshold is not a discount, it is a basket-size lever. Set it a little above your average order value and it pays for itself by pulling a second item into the cart. Set it below your average and you are simply handing away the delivery charge on orders you were going to get anyway.

Remember it is per shop: your buyer does not reach your threshold by spending at other shops, so the threshold needs to be reachable within your own catalogue.

Give an ETA you can hit on a bad week

Quote the range you can keep in a busy season, not your best-ever day. A shop that says three to five days and delivers on day four has a happy buyer. A shop that says next day and delivers on day four has an angry review, on a rating that only delivered orders can write. The second shop was faster in absolute terms and still lost.

Explain the per-shop charge in your policy

Buyers coming from pooled-shipping marketplaces are genuinely surprised to see three delivery charges in one basket. One sentence in your delivery policy — that you ship your own parcels with your own courier, so your charge covers only your parcel — turns a complaint into an explanation before it is ever made.

Review the rates every quarter

Courier prices move, fuel moves, and your product mix moves. A rate you set once and never revisited is either a slow leak or a lost order. Half an hour with last quarter's invoices is the cheapest margin you will find all year.

No shop yet? Open one free on Midmart and set your three zone charges from your seller panel on day one.