Rates verified against provider pricing pages in July 2026; page updated 27 August 2026. This is not a live feed: couriers reprice and negotiate, so confirm on the provider's own calculator before committing volume. Worked amounts are illustrative on a stated SKU, never benchmarks. The full dataset is downloadable at the end.
Shiprocket, NimbusPost and Delhivery are the three names every Indian D2C founder shortlists, and almost everyone compares them on the wrong number. The per-500g rate is barely half of what shipping actually costs once COD fees, GST on charges, weight disputes and RTO ride along. This page is a decision engine: your question answered directly, the verified rate card underneath it, and the full true-cost model that connects your courier choice to your contribution margin and the CAC you can afford.
Start on an aggregator free tier (Shiprocket Lite ₹26/500g or NimbusPost Essential ₹25.50/500g, ₹0 commitment; NimbusPost's free T+3 COD remittance makes it the better default for COD-heavy stores). Add a direct Delhivery account at 30+ orders a day for volume rates and D+2 COD remittance. And judge everything on effective logistics cost per delivered order, which on our illustrative model (₹799 COD order, stated assumptions) is roughly ₹229 (28.7% of AOV) once RTO drag is priced in, not the ₹38 on the rate card.
The decision matrix: your question, answered
| Your question | The answer |
|---|---|
| Cheapest to start | An aggregator free tier: Shiprocket Lite (₹26/500g) or NimbusPost Essential (₹25.50/500g), ₹0 commitment. Direct courier contracts only beat them at volume. |
| Fastest remittance (COD cash flow) | Delhivery direct: D+2 standard. At the free aggregator tiers NimbusPost T+3 beats Shiprocket D+8; paying Shiprocket 0.49-0.99% buys D+4/D+2. |
| Best for COD-heavy brands | Compare the COD FEE, not the freight: ₹36 fixed (Shiprocket) beats 2% only above ₹1,800 order value. Below ₹500 AOV, COD fees are the biggest single line after freight. |
| Best if RTO runs high | Whoever you ship with, you pay forward AND reverse on every RTO. The decision is NDR workflow quality and reverse rates, not the forward card; model it with the RTO drag formula below. |
| Best for fragile products | Packaging first, courier second: ~11% of unit loads arrive damaged (Shiprocket packaging data). Drop-test your pack, then prefer couriers with fewer hub transfers on your lanes; test with 10 shipments. |
| Best for low AOV (under ₹500) | The math is unforgiving: landed shipping runs 14-21% of a ₹599 order. Under ₹500, push prepaid share up and consider marketplace fulfilment; own-site COD at ₹399 rarely survives. |
| Best at scale (30+ orders/day) | A direct Delhivery account alongside your aggregator: volume-quoted rates, D+2 remittance, and negotiating power you never get inside an aggregator panel. |
| Best for returns/exchanges flow | Aggregators win on workflow (one-panel reverse pickups across couriers). Verify the REVERSE rate separately: it is often priced above forward and never shown on the headline card. |
| Aggregator vs direct, in one line | Aggregator = flexibility and courier redundancy while you learn your lanes; direct = rate and remittance advantage once your volume and lane pattern are stable. |
| True delivered cost | Freight + COD fee + 18% GST on charges + weight-dispute risk + RTO drag. The full model, on a real order, is the next section: the headline rate is barely half of it. |
The verified rate card [Verified external, July 2026]
Every row was checked against the provider's published pricing in July 2026. Full rows with per-field provenance are in the downloadable dataset.
| Provider · plan | Platform fee | Rate/500g | COD fee | COD remittance | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shiprocket Lite | ₹0/month | ₹26 | COD ₹36 fixed or 2% (higher) | D+8 working days, payouts Mon/Wed/Fri; early D+4 at 0.49% to D+2 at 0.99% | Up to ~5 orders/day |
| Shiprocket Business | ₹199/month | ₹25 | same COD structure | same cycle | Early volume |
| Shiprocket Advanced | ₹499/month | ₹23 | same COD structure | same cycle | 50-200 orders/month |
| Shiprocket Pro | ₹799/month | ₹20 | same COD structure | same cycle | High volume |
| NimbusPost Essential | ₹0 platform fee | ₹25.50 | COD ~₹27-40 by courier | T+3; early 1-2 days for a plan-dependent fee | Up to 300 orders/month |
| NimbusPost Lift | ₹0 platform fee | ₹24 | same | same | 300-1,000 orders/month |
| NimbusPost Elite | ₹0 platform fee | ₹19 | same | same | 1,000+ orders/month |
| Delhivery Direct (Delhivery One) | ₹0, pay per shipment | volume-quoted (₹40-55 at low volume) | COD ~₹40-50 or ~2% | D+2 standard (within 48 hours) | Any volume; best value at 30+/day |
Reading it honestly: the per-500g spread between aggregators is ₹1-6, small enough that pickup reliability, NDR workflow and remittance speed should outweigh it. The real spreads are the COD fee structure (₹36 fixed vs ~2% vs ₹40-50) and the remittance cycle (D+2 vs D+8), because those two hit cash flow on every single order.
Choosing a courier on the forward rate and discovering the reverse rate on the first RTO invoice. You pay freight twice on every failed delivery, reverse is often priced above forward, and on COD you also burned the collection attempt. A founder doing 300 orders a month at 25% RTO eats roughly 75 double-freight events a month; the ₹3 saved on the forward card is noise against that line.
What shipping ACTUALLY costs: the full chain on one order
ILLUSTRATIVE MODEL, NOT A BENCHMARK. Fixed assumptions: ₹799 AOV · 25% COD RTO · Zone C metro pair · 0.5 kg dead weight · ₹250 CAC. It is the same illustrative SKU as our unit economics reference, chosen to be representative and kept identical across our reference pages so the arithmetic can be followed end to end. The ₹229 effective cost below describes THIS model only; it is not an Indian D2C average, and your number moves with every assumption. What IS generally applicable: the two verified fee inputs (freight band and COD fee, per the rate card above) and the chain method itself, which is our calculation convention:
| Step | Amount | Running picture |
|---|---|---|
| Forward freight (Zone C, 0.5 kg) | ~₹38 | the headline number everyone compares |
| COD collection fee | ₹36 | fixed ₹36 beats 2% below ₹1,800 order value |
| GST 18% on charges | ~₹13 | landed shipping ~₹87 (10.9% of AOV); we round to ₹90 in the unit economics reference |
| RTO drag at 25% COD RTO | ₹142 | rate/(1-rate) x (₹80 fwd + ₹80 rev + ₹15 packaging + ₹250 burnt CAC) |
| Effective logistics per DELIVERED order | ~₹229 | 28.7% of AOV: the number that belongs in your model |
| CM1 (after COGS ₹240, shipping ₹90, gateway ₹16, packaging ₹25) | ₹428 | 53.6%: clears the ads-led floor |
| CM2 after ₹250 CAC | ₹178 | 22.3%: looks comfortable |
| CM2 after RTO drag | ₹36 | 4.5%: the honest per-order profit |
| Max sustainable CAC (15% CM2 target) | ₹308 | what this shipping stack lets you bid on Meta |
That last row is why this page and the unit economics page are one system: the courier decision sets the shipping input, the shipping input sets CM1, CM1 minus your CM2 target sets the CAC ceiling, and the CAC ceiling decides what you can afford to bid in the ad auction. Budget for the whole chain from day one in how much it costs to start a D2C brand.
COD remittance cycles: the cash-flow decider
| Cycle | Shiprocket | NimbusPost | Delhivery direct |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard (free) | D+8 working days, payouts Mon/Wed/Fri | T+3 | D+2 (within 48 hours) |
| Early option | D+4 at 0.49% · D+3 at 0.69% · D+2 at 0.99% | 1-2 days, fee depends on plan | already D+2 standard |
| Instant option | up to 70% of COD value next day, fee up to 5% | not published | not applicable |
Why this table outranks the rate card: on a COD-heavy store, the remittance cycle IS your working capital. NimbusPost's free T+3 against Shiprocket's free D+8 makes it the better default for COD-heavy stores at the free tier, and paying Shiprocket 0.49-0.99% to compress the cycle is often cheaper than the stockout it prevents. Delhivery's D+2 standard is a structural advantage that grows with volume.
The three hidden cost lines no rate card shows
Weight disputes: raised on ~28% of shipments
You declare 0.5 kg. Three weeks later the courier claims 1 kg volumetric and deducts the difference from your wallet automatically. Chargeable weight is the HIGHER of dead weight and volumetric (L x B x H in cm / 5000), so a light product in a big box is a volumetric product, full stop. The scale is bigger than most founders believe: couriers raise weight discrepancies on roughly 28% of shipments industry-wide, though fewer than 13% stick to the merchant after evidence checks, per Business Standard's report. On a quarter of your shipments, someone will try to charge you extra weight; whoever handles those disputes is protecting or leaking real money weekly.
- Shiprocket: 7-working-day window to dispute with product images, resolution in about 5-6 working days, and couriers must now attach image proof which Shiprocket validates before passing charges through, per its weight dispute system. Miss the window and the deduction stands.
- NimbusPost: a weight-freeze feature registers your SKU's dead weight and dimensions upfront, preventing most discrepancies from being raised at all. Prevention beats dispute for standardised catalogs.
- Delhivery direct: you dispute with the courier directly, no middle layer: faster with volume and a named account manager, slower as a small account in a support queue.
Whatever you choose: photograph every parcel on a scale with dimensions visible before handover, for at least your first 200 shipments. One photo per shipment wins more dispute money than any escalation email. The full arithmetic is in the volumetric weight guide; set a weekly calendar slot to clear the discrepancy queue inside the window.
RTO, priced properly
Forward + reverse + repack + the ad money that won the order. At 25% COD RTO our convention prices the drag at ₹142 per DELIVERED order on this SKU. Managing it is a P&L job, not an ops chore: address checks, COD-risk scoring, and sub-24h NDR response (30-50% of NDRs are savable inside 24 hours; the save rate halves past 48). The playbook is how to reduce RTO on COD orders.
Damage
Around 11% of unit loads arrive damaged (Shiprocket packaging data). For fragile categories the fix is packaging spec before courier choice: drop-test the pack, then run the 10-shipment test below on your shortlist.
Pickup reliability: the thing no rate card shows
A missed pickup means every order from that day breaches your promised dispatch SLA. On aggregators, pickups are done by whichever courier you assigned, so reliability is per courier per pincode, not per platform. In metros, pickups are dependable across all three options. In tier 2/3 towns this is where a direct Delhivery relationship often wins: one network, one pickup rider who learns your location, and at volume a fixed daily pickup slot written into your agreement. This is exactly what the 10-shipment test below measures before you commit.
Shopify integration quality
All three connect to Shopify, so the question is depth, not existence. Shiprocket's Shopify app is the most battle-tested in India: automatic order sync, tracking pushed back to Shopify, stable at volume. NimbusPost syncs Shopify plus WooCommerce and marketplaces on all plans, with custom channel integrations on higher tiers. Delhivery One has its own Shopify app for direct accounts: order sync and label generation, but you lose the courier-selection layer since everything ships Delhivery. Whichever you pick, make sure tracking pushes back into Shopify so the customer's order page shows current status; it cuts "where is my order" WhatsApp messages by more than half, which matters when you are the support team. Store not live yet? Set it up with the Shopify store setup guide and sort the payment stack with the Razorpay vs Cashfree comparison.
The volume playbook [Lab convention]
0-5 orders/day: aggregator free tier, zero commitment, learn your lanes. 5-30/day: paid aggregator tier; start negotiating your rate card and COD fee. 30+/day: open a direct Delhivery account alongside the aggregator: volume-quoted rates, D+2 remittance, and real bargaining power. Split traffic by lane performance, not loyalty; the method is in the multi-courier allocation strategy.
The 10-shipment test before you commit
- Run 10 real shipments through each shortlisted option in week one.
- Track: pickup requested vs actually collected same day, collection time, manifest accuracy.
- Track delivered TAT per lane against the promised zone TAT.
- Trigger one reverse pickup deliberately and time it; read the reverse rate off the invoice, not the sales deck.
- Check the first COD remittance against the promised cycle to the day.
- Then decide on effective cost per delivered order, not the rate card.
Running fulfilment across a network scaling from ₹400 crore to ₹1,200 crore taught me that courier decks all read the same and lanes never do. The same courier that is excellent Delhi-Jaipur can be the worst option Delhi-Guwahati. Ten real shipments per shortlisted partner, timed and logged, told us more than every rate negotiation we ever ran. Buy the lane, not the logo.
Methodology, sources and the data
Plan pricing and per-500g rates verified against shiprocket.in, nimbuspost.com and delhivery.com pricing pages in July 2026. Volumetric divisor, damage rate and NDR save windows per courier T&Cs and Shiprocket/ClickPost published data. The RTO drag formula is our costing convention, labeled wherever used. The true-cost chain is generated by the same script that writes the downloadable dataset, with inputs identical to our unit economics reference, so the two pages cannot disagree.
Download the data: rate rows with per-field provenance and verified dates, the decision matrix, and the true-delivered-cost model (CC BY 4.0, cite d2c-acquisitionlab.com): JSON · CSV.
Supplier Scorecard™, applied to couriers: score every partner monthly on five lines, rate per 500g, pickup reliability, RTO rate across your top 40 pin codes, COD remittance days, and NDR resolution speed. The cheapest rate card almost never wins the scorecard, because ₹5 saved on freight is wiped out by one extra RTO in forty.
Next action: price your own 10 shipments this week
Take your three most common parcel sizes, run each through the providers' own calculators, and compare total landed cost per delivered order rather than the headline rate. Confirm current numbers at source before you commit volume, since NimbusPost and Delhivery both publish their plans. Then weight the decision by returns, not rupees per parcel: Shipway's ShipNotes FY25 analysis puts COD RTO at about 26% against under 2% on prepaid, which moves your economics further than any rate difference on this page.
The conventions here come from Ravikant Tyagi's operating system, built across nine years of supply chain and fulfilment operations. If you'd like the complete execution system, including the calculators that run this arithmetic on your numbers, continue inside D2C Acquisition.Lab.
