Calculating packaging weight: from units sold to kilograms

The formula

For each country and each material, your declaration is the sum of two parts:

• Product packaging: for each product, the number of units sold in that country times the weight of one unit's packaging in that material.
• Shipping packaging: the number of orders delivered in that country times the weight of the shipping box, void fill and tape in that material.

Add both, divide by 1,000 for kilograms, and you have the figure you enter in the scheme's portal.

Step 1: units sold per country

Pull the orders for the declaration period from every sales channel, with the product, quantity and delivery country per order line. Watch three things:

• The delivery country counts, not the marketplace's country. An order through Amazon.de delivered to Austria is Austrian packaging.
• Combine all channels. bol, Amazon, Kaufland and your own webshop all deliver to the same country, and the scheme wants one total.
• Gross is the safe choice. Most schemes ask what you placed on the market. Only deduct returns where the scheme allows it and the packaging actually came back.

Step 2: weigh packaging, per component and per material

Take one unit of each product and weigh every packaging component separately: the box, the insert, the film, the label. Note the material and the grams per component. Do the same for your shipping packaging. A kitchen scale will do.

Start with your best sellers. With those weighed you usually have most of your kilograms covered, and you can see exactly which share of your sales still lacks a weight.

Worked example

A webshop sells a ceramic pour-over set. The product packaging is a 240 g box and a 30 g insert (270 g of paper and board together) plus 12 g of film (plastic). Every order ships in a 180 g cardboard box, sealed with 8 g of plastic tape. In Germany the webshop sold 1,200 units across 1,000 orders.

Had the webshop counted the shipping box per unit instead of per order, its paper figure would have been 540.0 kg: 36 kg too much. The more units customers buy per order, the bigger that gap.

Common mistakes

• Product weight instead of packaging weight. You declare only the packaging, not the product itself (except under schemes for the product, such as textiles or electronics).
• Forgetting shipping packaging, or counting it per unit.
• Forgetting void fill and tape. Small per order, but it adds up over thousands of orders.
• Declaring channels separately. One declaration per country, across all channels.
• Silently leaving out products without a weight. A total that misses part of your catalogue is too low. Know what share of your sales has a weight before you sign.
• Changing weights later without history. Record what you filed, so a later correction does not silently change a past declaration.

Spreadsheet or software?

With one channel, a handful of products and one country, a spreadsheet works fine. It gets hard once you have several channels that each export differently, products named differently on each channel, and several countries with their own material splits. You then keep two spreadsheets, one of sales and one of weights, and the day they drift apart is the day you sign the wrong number.

Channelsum is built for exactly that sum: it pulls units per country from your connected channels, you record the packaging weight once per product, and it calculates what you declare per country and per material, with shipping packaging per order and your catalogue coverage shown alongside.

Frequently asked questions

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