A budget is a landed total, so it buys kilograms as well as items
Every budget in this note is a landed total: item price, domestic delivery, service line, international freight and anything the destination charges, added together and compared against the figure you are willing to spend. That definition matters because freight is billed on chargeable weight, which means a budget buys mass as well as objects, and those 2 compete for the same money.
One placeholder makes the competition visible. Set P, the freight per kg, to $15 — a figure chosen only so the divisions below produce something readable. Under that assumption, every extra kilogram of packed weight removes $15 from what is left for items, and a 2 kg parcel already commits $30 of any budget before a single item is chosen.
| Where the money goes | Decided when | What it means for planning |
|---|---|---|
| Item subtotal | At the first payment, and changeable until the item reaches the warehouse | The only part of the budget you can still edit after ordering begins |
| Domestic delivery | Per seller, known at the first payment | Four sellers means four deliveries, not one |
| International freight | After packing, when the billed weight exists | Unknown at the moment you spend most of the budget |
| Destination charges | Set by your country’s import rules and the delivering carrier | Not verifiable from this page; check the official threshold that applies to you |
The 3rd row is the one that breaks budgets. At the moment you choose items, the freight number does not exist, so every tier below is really a rule about how much weight to aim for, not how many items to order.
The $80 tier: one parcel, four light items, nothing bulky
Set aside $30 for freight, which under the placeholder buys 2 kg of billed weight, and the item ceiling lands at $50. That ceiling supports about four light garments in one parcel and roughly nothing else. The tier works when the parcel stays under 2 kg and collapses the moment a single item adds 1.5 kg of boxed weight.
The best allocation inside $50 is boring on purpose: three or four garments from one seller, no shoes, no rigid boxes, nothing that needs its own carton. One seller means one domestic delivery line instead of three, and the [consolidation](/table/consolidation/) page explains why that single line is worth protecting at this tier.
- Keep the parcel to one carton so the volumetric weight cannot run away from the scale weight
- Refuse anything whose retail box weighs more than the item inside it
- Spend the item ceiling first and treat the $30 as already gone, because it is
- If two sellers are unavoidable, expect two domestic lines and cut one item to pay for them
The $15 per kg used across this page is an arithmetic placeholder. Your own quote replaces it, and the tier arithmetic scales with whatever that figure turns out to be.
The $200 tier: buying the option to drop one item
Reserve $45, which covers 3 kg under the placeholder, and the item ceiling is $155. The right way to spend it is not to spend all of it: keep about $20 of the ceiling unspent so that one item can be dropped at the QC stage without the parcel falling apart. That $20 is not slack, it is the price of a decision you have not made yet.
This tier is where a merge decision first becomes interesting. Two 1.5 kg parcels each carry their own minimum charge and their own handling line; one 3 kg parcel carries one of each. Merging is not automatically cheaper — the [merge-parcel](/steps/merge-parcel/) step lists what has to be true before it is — but at $200 the fixed lines are a large enough share of the total to be worth comparing.
| Parcel weight | Freight at the placeholder | Left for items | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 kg | $45 | $155 | The planned case |
| 4 kg | $60 | $140 | One heavy item, or a taller carton |
| 5 kg | $75 | $125 | A merge that added more weight than value |
Read the last column as a warning rather than a rule. Between the first row and the third, $30 of buying power disappears while the budget stays at $200, and 30 units is roughly one mid-priced garment. That is the amount at stake in a merge decision most people make in 10 seconds.
The $500 tier: two lanes, and the trap that arrives with the choice
Keep $90 back for a 6 kg parcel under the placeholder, and $410 remains for items. What this tier really buys is optionality: enough room to run two shipments on different lanes, to absorb a return, and to survive one item being wrong without cancelling the whole order. None of those options exist at $80, where a single mistake consumes the freight reserve.
The trap is that optionality looks like capacity. A 6 kg allowance becomes 9 kg the moment one bulky item joins the carton, and under the placeholder that is $135 of freight against a plan built on $90. The $45 difference comes out of the item ceiling, so the tier absorbs it — quietly, and at the cost of the item you were going to add next.
- Decide the lane for each shipment before the first item is ordered, not after packing
- Keep the second shipment under 2 kg if it exists only to preserve a delivery date
- Price the return leg before assuming a $500 budget can absorb two of them
- Track the running parcel weight weekly, because the allowance is spent by packing decisions, not by spending decisions
The [cost](/table/cost/) page lists the lines that a large tier suddenly makes visible, and the [pick-agent](/steps/pick-agent/) step is where a 2nd lane becomes possible at all, since 1 operator may not offer the route the plan depends on.
Moving up or down a tier: what changes and what does not
| Move | What it changes | What it does not change |
|---|---|---|
| Up one tier | The number of items, the number of shipments, and the room to absorb one mistake | The per-kg figure on the carrier card, which is set by the lane and the weight |
| Down one tier | The item ceiling and the tolerance for a bulky item | The fixed per-parcel lines, which take a larger share of a smaller budget |
| Same tier, lighter parcel | Freight, and therefore the item ceiling | The service line, which is charged per order and does not shrink with weight |
Two numbers move together across all three tiers and are worth memorising. Under the placeholder, one kilogram of billed weight is worth $15, and one garment of mid-range weight is worth roughly $30 — so a single heavy item costs the same as two ordinary ones, at any budget level.
The advice that does not change with the tier is the order of operations: choose the lane, then the sellers, then the items, then the packing. The advice that does change is what to do with the surplus. At $80 there is no surplus; at $200 it is one item’s worth of room; at $500 it is a second shipment and a return, and both of those can be spent by accident.
Every figure above rests on a single placeholder of $15 per kg. Replace it with your own quote and the ceilings move; the structure of the tiers does not.
Worked example: at a placeholder of $15 per kg, each extra kilogram of parcel removes $15 from the item budget. Moving the $200 tier from 3 kg to 5 kg cuts its item ceiling from $155 to $125, a 19.4% loss of buying power with no change in the budget itself. The per-kg placeholder is ours, not a quoted rate.
This note explains the mechanics; the list is where the items are.