Shipping goods across Australia is challenging. We’re a big, sparsely populated country with limited delivery options available—especially to small business. Consequently, delivery services in Australia are slow and expensive.
In this post, we look at three eCommerce shipping options available in Australia and compare and contrast their strengths and weakness.
Toll IPEC & Toll Priority
Toll IPEC and Priority operate as distinct businesses, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll be discussing them together as they share many of the same issues. Generally speaking, smaller items that fit into satchels will be sent with Priority and larger items (up to 25kg) will be sent with IPEC.
To put it bluntly, Toll are an absolute nightmare to deal with. Even the first step of using them as our courier—creating an account—was a months-long process.
Both Toll Priority and Toll IPEC share the same shipment booking system known as MyToll. MyToll is possibly the worst website you will ever encounter in your life. Not only is MyToll comically complicated, it’s also prone to crashing at least once a week.
Each delivery booked into MyToll needs to be booked twice—once to create the shipment, then again to have the shipment picked up. There is no way to batch multiple shipments into a single a pickup. This makes Toll vastly more time consuming than any of the other delivery services we’re going to discuss.
Toll charge (arguably exorbitant) redelivery fees on orders that don’t have authority to leave. A 500g satchel sent with Toll Priority halfway across the country may only cost $6, but the re-delivery of that item (which is already at the nearest depot) will cost almost $30. If the re-delivery attempt fails, they’ll just keep trying again and again until you’ve racked up hundreds of dollars worth of fees. Sometimes, even if authority to leave has been granted, the Toll delivery driver may arbitrarily decide not to leave the item unattended and you’ll still be charged re-delivery fees.
Re-delivery fees aren’t the only thing a retailer needs to worry about. Toll will add safe handling fees or manual handling fees (the distinction between these is unclear) seemingly at random. Sometimes you’ll send the exact same parcel to the exact same address and be charged two wildly different amounts. Expect to spend many hours examining Toll invoices to find overcharges.
Toll isn’t all negative though. Despite their issues, Toll’s delivery service is extremely quick and (in certain situations) much more affordable than their competitors.
Toll Pros
- Exceptionally fast delivery.
- Short-range metro delivery is very affordable.
Toll Cons
- Exorbitant re-delivery fees and handling fees.
- Customer service so poor it might as well be non-existent.
- Booking parcels is slow and cumbersome
Sendle
Sendle position themselves as an affordable alternative to Australia Post. They don’t actually own any vehicles or processing facilities, instead acting as broker between customers and smaller courier firms like Fastway and CouriersPlease.
Sendle’s flat-rate parcel delivery costs are very appealing to eCommerce businesses, as one knows exactly how much delivery is going to cost to any given address, and can charge customers accordingly. They also don’t charge for re-delivery or return-to-sender, so there’s no unexpected shipping costs to be worried about.
The downside of fixed-cost shipping rates is that some locations are overcharged considerably. A 20kg product sent from Sydney CBD to Melbourne CBD will cost around $12 with Toll, but will still incur Sendle’s standard $27.95 cost. On the other hand, the same parcel sent from Melbourne to suburban Perth with Toll would be around $40. If using Sendle exclusively, be prepared to win some and lose some.
Sendle have a very seamless integration with most of the popular eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and eBay.
Sendle Pros
- Booking parcels is extremely easy.
- Flat-rate pricing model offers much-needed consistency.
- Competitive pricing.
- Free Re-delivery attempts.
Sendle Cons
- Larger-sized items (over 10kg) are overly expensive to send.
- Inconsistent quality between various 3rd-party delivery providers.
- Can’t book same day pickups
Australia Post
Australia Post is too expensive to be considered a viable delivery option for eCommerce businesses. The only place they really excel is their pre-paid satchels, which can be sent to regional and remote areas at no additional cost. A 500g AusPost satchel can be sent anywhere in Australia for $8.30, compared to $20 for Sendle and between $20-$40 for Toll.
Australia Post Pros
- Flat rate services include regional/remote areas.
- Support for P.O. boxes and parcel lockers.
Australia Post Cons
- Parcel delivery is shockingly expensive.
- Regular service is very slow.
- Express service only includes limited routes, limited package sizes, and is much more expensive.
Closing Thoughts
So which delivery service should you use for your eCommerce business? There’s a case to be made for using all of them. While Sendle is our go-to option for the overwhelming majority of deliveries, we still use Toll for larger products or when express shipping is requested, and AusPost is useful for those smaller regional deliveries.
Hi, How about TNT and StarTrack? Any experience with these 2? Thank you,
No, sorry.
TNT is an absolutely nightmare if you are sending to residential address. it turns more to b2b only. because they are charging extra fees for residential deliveries. like $55 for under 100kg and it will be much more if you send something heavier than 100kg. and tailgate service is forced to use. avoid tnt if you are not b2b based. startrack is better as it is technically australia post who take bigger stuff. you can also look at border express. but beware of multiple boxes delivery with border express because they won’t scan them all.
I’ve now experienced this too.
They charge a $55 surcharge if the parcel weighs 30kg or more. What’s hidden in their T&Cs is that they always round up to the next whole kilogram, so a 29.01kg parcel will also cop the 30kg surcharge.
We are based in Melbourne and have been using Toll for all our deliveries. And we face exactly the same problems with Toll’s customer service – neither we nor our customer can get any reasonable explanation where is the package or what is going on.
Not having a good alternative for interstate deliveries, but we ended up with Uget delivery service (https://uget.net.au) for Melbourne. Easy and fast. Maybe a bit overpriced but its quality is really high. At least you understand what you pay for.
I’m using Big Post, who are a broker, and they use Toll but also have TNT, Fastway, Couriers Please etc, so they give you a lot of options all on the one platform, which saved me time from logging into different websites which is a bit of a pain and re entering customer details and dimensions. Very competitive rates as well, oh and they have their own in house customer service which I was really shocked about, but its saved me heaps of time from calling the carriers myself.
Thats fantastic Stefan, what items do you ship? are they able to do different size items.
Unfortunately these comments about Sendle are not correct “…one knows exactly how much delivery is going to cost to any given address, and can charge customers accordingly…so there’s no unexpected shipping costs to be worried about.” I’ve stopped using Sendle for my small business after noticing a number of “shipping adjustments” where I was billed additional costs ($13+ additional charges on top of $7.50 paid for small satchels weighing under 500g).
This is a relatively new thing; and will certainly be mentioned in an update to this article. We’re on team Shippit now.
Sendle have become increasingly unreliable to point that we have to look at a viable alternative. I will have to take a look at Big post.
Can anyone recommend a Delivery Service provider that offers prepaid satchels? We are an online retailer and don’t want to go through the hassle of measuring/weighing each individual parcel. Until now we’ve used Toll DX Mail Prepaid Satchels to deliver 1kg, 3kg and 5kg parcels domestically but issues with Toll’s accounts processing have occured in the past months where we’ve been double-charged for an order of prepaid satchels and we’re now looking for an alternative provider. eParcel’s volumetric weight calculations model makes sending parcels with AusPost quite expensive for us as our products weight 150gm but the item size is what blows out the shipping costs per parcel.
MailPlus? I believe they use the Toll network but separate you from Toll’s less-than-competent billing and administration.
mailplus are australia only. Dunno about Bigpost. I need to mail to USA mainly, Auspost are atrociously expensive, sendle seems the only option so far, but they are getting negative feedback, so not sure really.
Toll would have to be the worst company in Australia if not the world .Australian Post /Startrack run rings around local freight companies.Usually fast and always in touch if there is a problem they can usually handle it to a point although internationally they are not up to scratch.However their last mile service can’t be beaten except by Amazon .Toll are like a bunch of hermits hiding in a mound.can’t find them when you need them, complicated communications, very poor delivery,never on time always late let Fedex or UPS buy them out and sack half their staff then we might get a world class delvery service.
Add Aramex – waited 3 weeks for a delivery from Sydney to Melbourne only to discover they’d renamed it “undeliverable”.