Business shippers in the Netherlands paid an average of €3.93 for every consumer parcel they sent in 2025, according to new figures from the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM), the Dutch competition regulator. That is twelve cents more than in 2024, a rise of just over three percent in a single year. On its own, twelve cents sounds trivial. Multiply it across a webshop that ships forty thousand parcels a year and it becomes an unplanned €4,800 hit to the bottom line, before a single extra euro is spent on marketing, returns, or customer service. For an industry that has spent the last two years talking about margin discipline, this is the kind of number that deserves more attention than it has received.

What the ACM's 2025 Post and Package Monitor Actually Shows

The ACM publishes its Post and Package Monitor every year to track the health of the Dutch parcel and post market, and the 2025 edition paints a more nuanced picture than the €3.93 headline suggests. Total turnover in the Dutch package market reached €2,596 million in 2025, up from €2,527 million in 2024, a 2.7 percent increase. Volume grew only marginally, from 609 million to 615 million pieces. In other words, carriers are making more money from roughly the same number of parcels, and business-to-consumer (B2C) shipments are absorbing almost all of that increase.

B2C is the largest segment of the market by a wide margin, generating more than 76 percent of total package revenue. That is precisely where the average price rose. Two other segments moved in the opposite direction. Business-to-business (B2B) parcel prices actually fell slightly to €5.63, and consumer-to-consumer (C2X) prices, the kind of shipment you send when you sell something secondhand, dropped by roughly six percent to €5.23. Webshops, in other words, are the one group of shippers absorbing a real cost increase while every other segment of the same market got cheaper.

Why B2C Costs Rise While Everything Else Falls

There is a structural reason for that split, and it is not simply inflation. PostNL and DHL together control at least 90 percent of the domestic B2C parcel market in the Netherlands. When two carriers hold that much share in the segment that matters most to e-commerce, they effectively set the market price for it, and webshops have little practical leverage to push back. B2B and C2X shipments are more exposed to competition from regional couriers, freight brokers, and peer-to-peer delivery apps, which keeps those prices under pressure. B2C shipments mostly are not.

This is not a uniquely Dutch story. Every major European market has some version of the same concentration problem, whether it is two carriers, three, or a dominant national postal operator with a single serious private competitor. What makes the Netherlands useful as a case study is that the ACM actually measures and publishes it, giving e-commerce operators a rare, regulator verified benchmark instead of the usual guesswork about whether their own rate increases are in line with the market or simply a carrier testing what it can get away with.

What a Twelve Cent Increase Actually Costs Your Business

Shipping cost increases rarely arrive as a single dramatic line item. They arrive as a few cents here, a fuel surcharge there, a peak season supplement in November, and a small base rate adjustment in January. Individually, each one is easy to absorb. Add them up over a full year and a webshop shipping 10,000 parcels loses roughly €1,200 to this single increase alone. A brand shipping 100,000 parcels loses €12,000. Neither number shows up as a single alarming invoice. Both quietly erase a percentage point or more of net margin, which is exactly why so few finance teams catch it until the annual numbers are already in.

The uncomfortable part is that most of that increase gets passed silently into cost of goods sold rather than renegotiated, challenged, or offset. In our conversations with mid-market e-commerce finance and operations leads, fewer than half regularly benchmark their actual paid carrier rates against current market averages like the ACM's. The rest find out they were overpaying only when a new shipping platform, a broker, or an article like this one puts a number in front of them.

Four Ways E-Commerce Shippers Can Protect Margin in 2026

1. Treat carrier rates as a living number, not an annual contract line

Most webshops negotiate carrier rates once a year and then stop looking at them. Carriers, meanwhile, adjust fuel surcharges, dimensional weight thresholds, and remote area fees far more often than that. A rate that looked competitive in January can quietly lose its edge by June. Reviewing actual paid rates against current published benchmarks quarterly, not annually, is one of the cheapest things a shipping team can do to catch drift early.

2. Never rely on a single carrier for your largest volume segment

When PostNL and DHL hold 90 percent of the B2C market between them, a webshop that ships exclusively with one of the two has effectively no negotiating position and no fallback if that carrier's service quality slips or its rates jump. Spreading volume across multiple carriers, even unevenly, creates real leverage and protects delivery continuity when one network hits capacity limits during peak season.

3. Shop rates at the point of shipment, not at the point of contract signing

A negotiated annual rate card is a starting point, not a guarantee of the cheapest option for every parcel. Weight, destination, service level, and surcharges all shift the true cost of a shipment in ways a static rate card cannot reflect. Software that compares live, all-in costs across carriers at the moment a label is generated routinely finds five to fifteen percent in savings that a fixed contract alone would have missed.

4. Make the data visible to the people who can act on it

Shipping cost data usually lives in a carrier invoice, a spreadsheet, or a warehouse manager's inbox, far from the finance and operations leaders who set pricing and margin targets. Surfacing real per-parcel cost trends in the same dashboard finance already uses turns an abstract twelve cent increase into a concrete, trackable line that someone is accountable for.

Why This Matters Beyond the Netherlands

The Netherlands is a useful case study precisely because the ACM is unusually transparent, but the underlying dynamic, a small number of dominant carriers setting the price for the highest volume shipping segment, is the norm across Germany, France, Belgium, and most of the rest of the EU. Businesses shipping across borders often face this pressure multiplied, because a rate increase from a dominant carrier in one country rarely arrives in isolation from similar moves in neighbouring markets. Treating shipping strategy as a single-country, single-carrier decision is increasingly a liability for any e-commerce brand selling across the EU, which is exactly why a pan-European, multi-carrier view of cost and performance has become a competitive requirement rather than a nice to have.

How Zineps Turns This Data Into a Margin Strategy

This is precisely the gap Zineps was built to close. As the Operating System for Shipments, Zineps sits between your order management system and every carrier you use, whether that is PostNL, DHL, DPD, UPS, or a regional specialist, and gives you one place to see, compare, and automate shipping decisions across all of them. Instead of discovering a rate increase in an annual carrier statement, Zineps surfaces real-time, per-shipment cost data so you can spot drift the month it happens, not the year after.

Our multi-carrier automation engine applies rules you define, cheapest available service, fastest delivery promise, or a blended rule that protects margin on high-volume lanes, and assigns every parcel to the right carrier automatically at the moment of shipment. That means the four defensive steps above stop being a quarterly manual project and become a default setting. Combined with our carrier performance benchmarking scorecards and shipping cost modeling tools, e-commerce and logistics teams get the same kind of visibility the ACM gives the market as a whole, but at the level of their own individual shipments, carriers, and customers.

Zineps customers who move from single-carrier setups to automated multi-carrier routing typically recover a meaningful share of exactly the kind of margin erosion the ACM's 2025 monitor describes, without asking customers to pay more at checkout. That is the difference between reacting to a regulator's annual report and running a shipping operation that adjusts continuously, on its own.

Key Questions About the 2025 Dutch Shipping Cost Data

Why did B2C shipping costs rise in the Netherlands while B2B and C2X costs fell?

Because the B2C segment is the most concentrated. PostNL and DHL together hold at least 90 percent of the domestic B2C parcel market, giving them pricing power in the segment e-commerce depends on most. B2B and C2X shipments face more competition from regional couriers and delivery apps, which keeps those prices flat or falling.

How much does a small shipping rate increase actually cost an e-commerce business per year?

A twelve cent increase per parcel, the size the ACM recorded for 2025, costs a webshop shipping 10,000 parcels a year roughly €1,200, and one shipping 100,000 parcels roughly €12,000. Because it arrives gradually through surcharges and small rate adjustments, most finance teams only notice the cumulative impact at year end.

What is the fastest way for a webshop to reduce shipping costs without switching carriers?

Compare live, all-in rates across the carriers already in your contract at the moment each label is generated, rather than relying on a single negotiated rate card. This alone, done through automated multi-carrier routing, typically recovers five to fifteen percent in shipping cost without any new carrier negotiation or contract change.

The Outlook for the Rest of 2026

Nothing in the ACM's data or in the broader European carrier market suggests this pressure is temporary. New EU customs rules for non-EU parcels, ongoing fuel and energy cost volatility, and truck toll schemes rolling out across member states are all additional cost pressures layering on top of the base carrier rate increases the ACM already measured for 2025. E-commerce businesses that treat shipping as a fixed operating cost, set once and reviewed rarely, will keep absorbing these increases silently. Businesses that treat shipping as a managed, data-driven function, the way they already manage advertising spend or inventory, will be the ones still protecting margin when the 2026 monitor is published next year.

If your team is still discovering rate increases in a year-end invoice instead of a live dashboard, it is worth finding out what your actual per-parcel cost trend looks like today. Talk to Zineps to see how real-time, multi-carrier shipping intelligence can turn data like the ACM's into a concrete margin strategy for your business.