What is the heaviest package you can ship

What is the heaviest package you can ship?

Every Friday, we answer a common question about fulfillment, shipping, or business. This week’s question comes from one of the fans who entered our giveaway contest for an Echo Show 5. Today we will answer the following question: “what is the heaviest package you can ship?”

The Heaviest Package You Can Ship: Different Carriers, Different Rules

While we at Fulfillrite generally specialize in small, lightweight items, we can ship larger ones if needed. This is because postal carriers, including USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL, all have surprisingly lenient rules on the weight of packages that can be shipped.

USPS will let you ship items up to 70 pounds or 31.75 kg.

FedEx will let you ship items up to 150 pounds or 68 kg.

UPS will let you ship items up to 150 pounds or 68 kg.

DHL will let you ship items up to 154.3 pounds or 70 kg.

The simple fact is that these guidelines are in place because lifting packages in excess of 150 pounds is very difficult to do without special equipment. Carriers already have limited space on their trucks and a strong incentive to save fuel. Moving 200+ pound packages would be all-around hard to do on a day-to-day basis.

If possible, break apart your heavy shipments into multiple packages. For example, if shipping a weight set, each 45-pound and 35-pound plates should be in a separate box. Two 25-pound plates can be packaged into one box, and smaller plates can go together as long as the overall box weight is not excessive. Safety is very important!

Need to Ship More? You Need Freight!

Let’s say you need to ship a few hundred or even several thousand pounds of inventory at once. If that’s the case, you can’t use the regular postal system. You just can’t. They’re not prepared for that kind of load.

In this situation, you need to coordinate freight shipping. That means using a marketplace such as Freightos to arrange for a freight truck to pick up the inventory and move it to where it needs to go. Freight shipping can also include sea and air shipping if appropriate.

Freight carriers have the ability to carry extremely heavy items in a way that regular postal carriers do not. Unfortunately, they tend to be considerably more expensive. Thankfully, most individual consumers will never need to coordinate freight shipping. Freight shipping is almost always used for business-to-business shipments.

Final Thoughts

The heaviest package you can ship through the mail is surprisingly big at over 154 pounds. It’s hard to imagine individual consumers needing much more than that, so we can be thankful that the postal carriers are so accommodating 🙂

You’ve done everything by the book. Your Kickstarter campaign is almost ready to launch.

You made a great product. Built an audience. Set up a campaign page.

But how do you ship it?

We put this checklist together to help you get started. It's free.