The global ecommerce market is expected to total $4.8 trillion in 2025. And according to Statistica, by 2027 it’s expected that 23% of all retail sales will happen online.

As delivery expectations rise, big and bulky items (like bikes, fridges, surfboards) bring weight, size, and handling complexities that multiply with scale.

On the small end, those complications are annoying. On at enterprise scale, they’re margin killers. Big and bulky items are slower to move, riskier to deliver, and more costly when issues occur. These items clog up floor space, can’t be thrown over a fence, and won’t tolerate sloppy service levels.

Australia’s dispersed geography presents numerous challenges when it comes to its freight network, particularly when talking about regional deliveries, and reveals the hidden cost structures that can make or break cashflow.

With five years managing carrier performance and two years focused exclusively on big freight, Commercial Shipping Manager, Mitch Taylor, sees the cost gaps that only surface at enterprise scale.

We sat down with Mitch to get his honest take on things, after working with furniture, white goods, and other bulky product retailers in his role at Shippit - and he had a few things to say.

TL;DR

• Wrong-fit deliveries destroy margins faster than failed ones: A $19 ironing board with white glove service costs more than the product itself and happens more often than retailers admit.
• Regional failures aren't just expensive but exponential: When a $5,000 delivery fails 45 minutes from the last drop, you're not paying a redelivery fee, you're funding a dedicated truck run.
• Store dispatching creates hidden bleed: Misdeclared weights and dimensions from store staff trigger surcharges that can exceed 30% of original freight costs.

Product-service matching is mission-critical (and often missing)

Retailers can unknowingly subsidise delivery experiences that cost more than the product being sold.

When you break it down:

• Standard white glove delivery cost: $80-120 per delivery
• Product margin on $19 item: Typically $3-8
• Net result: Delivery can cost 10x the margin

This type of thing happens at scale when retailers default to premium services thinking of consistency, without looking deeper at per-SKU delivery costs and margins. This isn’t a one-off as Mitch sees it daily at Shippit, and it rarely shows up in standard margin reports. The problem arises when low-value items get subsidised by high-value margin sales, which hides the profit drain that compounds with volume.

Living By Design solved this by implementing carrier matching across their range, from paper napkins to 100kg concrete tables. As Technical Operations Manager Edwina Young explains, when asked why they chose Shippit: "We needed a system that integrated seamlessly with the many different platforms we use for logistics and inventory management [that could] also accommodate the most number of carriers across the freight network."

The key was building automated rules that match freight profiles to appropriate service levels, eliminating manual decision-making that defaults to expensive options.

👉 Data Point: Wrong-fit deliveries can create cost overruns of 10x your margins on low-value SKUs.

👉 Strategic Implication: The most profitable furniture retailers aren't those with the best delivery service. They're those with the most precise service-to-value matching.

3 things big and bulky retailers need to think about for their deliveries

1. Regional vs metro deliveries

Delivery failures are profit killers outside of metro postcodes. Regional big freight is both more expensive per kilometre and multiplies the failure to deliver maths, which makes the last-mile strategy a make-or-break point for retailers delivering big and bulky.

As Mitch puts it, "Regional deliveries will be your highest freight costs in the whole delivery market."

Here's the maths that only surfaces at scale:

Metro truck economics:

• 5-10 big freight items per truck
• Next delivery 10-15 minutes away
• Failure cost = futile fee + 15-minute opportunity cost

Regional truck economics:

• Same 5-10 items per truck
• Next delivery 30-45 minutes away
• Failure cost = futile fee + 45-minute opportunity cost + potential return-to-depot

When that $5,000 lounge fails delivery in regional Queensland, you're not just paying a redelivery fee; you're funding a truck that's now carrying 1 item instead of 10 for the return journey, plus the labour costs of a failed premium delivery attempt.

And if you think you can pass that cost onto the customer, think again. Mitch sees most retailers absorb it and lose the customer for good.

Having live quoting at the checkout, as well as good tracking and notification in place for deliveries becomes a necessity.

"Over-communication in the white glove bulky delivery space is always better. You'll see that typically carriers will try to inform these customers that they will have a delivery in the next 3 days with a date and time."

The cost of SMS updates, phone calls, and GPS tracking is a speck compared to one failed regional delivery.

2. Distributed fulfilment vs centralised fulfilment

Store staff aren't freight specialists, and the measurement mistakes compound at scale in ways that only become visible when you're processing hundreds of weekly dispatches.

“Freight dispatched from store networks compared to warehouses have a higher rate of misdeclared sizes and weights of products. There's typically a large knowledge gap in educating the store staff of the implications of getting these measurements wrong,” Mitch remarks.

Here's how the economic cascade works:

A mis-declared 2-seater sofa:

• Actual dimensions: 2.2m length
• Staff declares: 1.8m length
• Length surcharge triggered: $45-80 additional fee
• Manual handling required: Another $30-50
• Original freight quote: $65
• Actual cost: $140-195 (115-200% increase)

Scale this across volume:

• 100 weekly big freight dispatches from stores
• 15% measurement error rate (conservative)
• Average surcharge: $60
• Annual cost bleed: $46,800

Centralisation is a factor that many retailers need to seriously consider.

"The most cost-effective and operationally efficient strategy should be to dispatch all the oversized freight from one or few centralised locations to increase the volumes at one site that is more operationally equipped to manage these types of goods," Mitch adds.

Harvey Norman proves distributed dispatch can work, but only by eliminating the friction that creates measurement errors. They reduced fulfilment to "just two mouse clicks" and cut fulfilment time by 88%. The key was technology that prevented measurement errors at source, not by hoping staff would get complex freight calculations right under pressure.

3. Standalone house vs apartment deliveries

What most people think: apartments make big freight delivery harder and more expensive.

However, Mitch emphasises that’s not always the case. "When it comes to more premium white-good deliveries, apartment living doesn't necessarily make it worse. I believe it's more on par with standard house deliveries," Mitch explains.

How to think about it:

• Traditional view: Apartments = stairs + narrow spaces = higher costs
• Economic reality: Modern apartments = home recipients + scheduled deliveries = predictable costs
• The only anomaly: "The complexity comes from stairs...older apartment blocks without lifts that make oversized freight deliveries difficult"

This is where premium delivery services shine. Being able to deliver on your promises down to the exact day, offering two-man room-of-choice service for heavy items, and ensuring customers receive clear tracking and notifications to help them plan to be home.

Why single carrier strategies struggle at scale

"Everyone's asking for more optionality in the big and bulky space," Mitch explains. "The more options you have, the easier it is to get it right on which carrier should be used for the goods being shipped out."

This isn't about any individual carrier's capabilities, but about having the right tool for each job. When different carriers excel in different freight profiles and service levels, the prudent move is to ensure you review the right service level is handling the right leg of your freight journey.

The portfolio economics work like this:

Single carrier dependency scenario:

• Peak period hits, primary carrier reaches 90% capacity
• Single available service levels becomes a bottleneck that causes delays

Multi-carrier portfolio scenario:

• Peak period hits, primary carrier reaches 90% capacity
• Automatically route to appropriate alternative carriers (rules set up in advance)

Freedom Furniture demonstrates this in practice. They achieved 20% freight cost savings through a multi-carrier strategy specifically because they could match service levels to product values while maintaining carrier optionality during peak periods.

For retailers with mixed freight profiles (think both white goods and small electronics) multi-carrier platforms automate product-to-carrier matching through a single integration.

"Single carrier can mean a single point of failure," as Mitch puts it. "You need more than a single carrier to provide different service levels at the right freight price for the product being delivered."

👉 Data Point: Multi-carrier strategies can reduce capacity crunch cost impacts. Depending on how your automation rules are set up, you can even achieve 20% cost savings like Freedom Furniture did.

👉 Strategic Implication: Carrier portfolios need redundancy and resilience when individual providers hit operational limits. Consider what the risk is when you continue relying on a single carrier for all of your freight.

Your checklist for reviewing big and bulky freight

✅ Look for wastage in wrong-fit delivery services by SKU or missed deliveries

Audit your lowest-value SKUs against delivery service costs from the last 6 months in detail. If delivery costs exceed 40% of product margin, it’s a sign you need to look at strategies to mitigate potential wastage. Consider whether you can set up automated delivery rules that match service to value in your ecommerce or shipping platform.

✅ Audit store dispatch and misdeclaration risk

Track surcharge rates by location and calculate annual cost bleed from misdeclared dimensions and weights. Either look at investing in systematic staff training or centralise dispatch for high-surcharge SKUs.

✅ Build carrier portfolio stress tests

Model peak capacity scenarios across your carrier mix. Ensure you can maintain service levels and cost targets when individual carriers hit operational limits. Thinking about whether to diversify your carrier mix? Book a demo with the Shippit team to understand your options for different carrier mixes without significant cost increases.

✅ Engineer delivery certainty (especially for regional)

Implement 3-day pre-alerts, day-of-delivery time windows, next-stop SMS, and live GPS tracking for white-glove drops so recipients are actually home. One failed regional run doesn’t just cost a futile fee, it burns an entire truck leg. For bulky goods, certainty matters more than speed, and the cheapest insurance you can buy is over-communication.

✅ Clean up rate hygiene to avoid bill shock

Reconcile rate cards, surcharges, and billed vs quoted costs weekly. Shippit spends hours each week doing exactly this, because small misalignments like a misdeclared sofa length or a hidden manual-handling fee balloon into unexpected 30% cost overruns. Map these by lane and carrier, so finance isn’t discovering them two weeks later when the invoice lands.

The hidden costs Mitch sees across Australia's furniture retailers aren't only operational inefficiencies, they're also competitive advantages that can be captured by those who are willing to invest and break apart from the crowd in a high-cost/high-stakes product category.