Knowledge Base

In an earlier article, we introduced United States Postal Service (USPS) Commercial Base Pricing (CBP) which is a discounted rate offered by USPS to their customers who buy and print shipping labels online such as via the USPS Click-N-Ship online service. There is no minimum shipping volume required for CBP so any business or indvidual is eligible. If you are a high volume shipper, you may also be eligible for Commercial Plus Pricing (CPP) which offers further discounts than CBP. The domestic shipping volume requirements for CPP are

• 50,000 Priority Mail shipments in prior calendar year, or
• 5,000 Priority Mail Express shipments in prior 12 months

Commercial Plus Pricing is available with:

• Priority Mail
• Priority Mail Express
• First Class Package International Service
• Priority Mail International
• Priority Mail Express International
• Global Express Guaranteed

Comparison of Commercial Base and Commercial Plus Rates

To give you an idea of how much you can save with CPP, the following tables compare the prices between normal CBP and CPP rates. You can compare the differences between CBP and CPP rates for your typical shipments by visiting the USPS Business Price Calculator.

The first table shows the postage for a 13 ounce small package from west coast to east coast.

The second table shows the rates for a 18" x 18" x 14" package weighing 3 lbs for the same pair of addresses as previous example. Because the package maximum length exceeds 12", USPS uses dimensional weight for Priority Mail rates calculation.

As you can see, CPP offers you additional savings over CBP. If you are a USPS high volume shipper, you should consider using CPP to lower shipping costs. To help you with this, the SolvingMaze Advanced Shipping Calculator supports both Commercial Base Pricing and Commercial Plus Pricing so that you may take advantage of either discount rates in your shopping cart system such as Magento and start saving money on shipping. If you prefer to integrate the calculator to your own shopping cart, ERP or WMS application yourself, you can also use our Pack and Quote API. In addition to CPP, the calculator supports USPS Priority and Regional Flat Rate shipping so combined with CPP, you can lower shipping costs even further.

For more ideas on how you can save shipping and streamline your order fulfillment process, check out our other articles.