Thursday, October 28, 2010

POSLAJU: Volumetric Weight Label (Malaysia)

What is Volumetric label?
"If you are shipping an item that takes up a lot of space but isn't very heavy, a shipping company might charge you for the item's volumetric weight instead of its actual weight. Light packages that take up a lot of room in a shipper's trucks or airplanes actually cost the company money to ship if they are charged based only on their actual weight."

To denote the parcels and boxes using Volumetric weighting, POSLAJU used an interesting round label. Printed in black and stated "Item ini menggunakan pengukuran" in Malay. Translated as "This item use measurements". POSLAJU also offer rectangular boxes for volumetric measurements. 
Want to know more on volumetric weight, I extracted below an explanation from Wikipedia. You may also get more details from UPS, DHL and TNT website, the formula vary from different shipping company:

Shipping companies will not ship items that exceed a certain dimensional weight (also known as volumetric weight).

Shipping costs have historically been calculated on the basis of gross weight in kilograms or pounds. By charging only by weight, lightweight, low density packages become unprofitable for freight carriers due to the amount of space they take up in the truck/aircraft/ship in proportion to their actual weight. The concept of Dimensional Weight has been adopted by the transportation industry worldwide as a uniform means of establishing a minimum charge for the cubic space a package occupies.

Dimensional weight is a calculation of a theoretical weight of a package. This theoretical weight is the weight of the package at a minimum density chosen by the freight carrier. If the package is below this minimum density, then the actual weight is irrelevant as the freight carrier will charge for the volume of the package as if it was of the chosen density (what the package would weigh at the minimum density). Furthermore, the volume used to calculate the Dimensional Weight may not be absolutely representative of the true volume of the package. The freight carrier will measure the longest dimension in each of the three axis (X,Y,Z) and use these measurements to determine the package volume. If the package is a right-angled rectangular cuboid (box), then this will be equal to the true volume of the package. However, if the package is of any other shape, then the calculation of volume will be more than the true volume of the package.  

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