The carrier invoice has one big advantage over every other delivery cost: it shows up looking official.
There’s the rate, right there in black and white. Easy to drop into a spreadsheet, easy to compare against budget, easy to announce as a win. Meanwhile, the dispatcher who spent half an hour rescuing the order is on payroll. The refund lives with finance. Two WISMO tickets belong to CX. If the customer never orders again, that cost may never get a name at all.
That’s how a $9 delivery stays a $9 delivery long after the business has spent considerably more than $9 on it.
Useful delivery ROI starts by widening the lens. Cost per successful delivery gives you the base, but five inputs decide whether that number resembles reality.
Input 1: Failure Rate
Start with the orders that made everyone work twice.
An order gets reassigned after pickup falls through. Another sits untouched until the customer cancels. A third needs a refund and another delivery tomorrow. Traditional reporting can scatter those outcomes across several buckets, which makes the on-time number look healthier than the operation felt.
For delivery ROI, pull the exception log and price every retry, refund, second attempt, and manual save. Failed deliveries can cost three to six times the original attempt once redelivery and handling enter the picture.
That’s also why our approach at Burq toward last-mile delivery analytics puts exceptions in the same conversation as successful deliveries. Failure rate changes the denominator before you ever start arguing about rates.
Input 2: Landed Cost Per Order
Once you know how many deliveries really succeeded, then the rate gets its turn.
Use the one you paid.
FedEx and UPS started 2026 with 5.9% general rate increases, while Ground residential surcharges rose 8.4%. A contract can stay exactly where you left it while the cost of using it keeps wandering off.
Take 90 days of quotes and put them against 90 days of invoices. That spread belongs in delivery ROI because it’s what the order cost after the fine print had its say.
Provider choice can move that number too. We can evaluate orders across our delivery network alongside a retailer’s in-house drivers. Doing so lets the economics change order by order instead of waiting for the next annual negotiation.
Input 3: Dispatch Hours
Now leave transportation for a minute and walk over to payroll. There’s a good chance some of your delivery spend is sitting there.
Watch a dispatcher work, and you’ll see why. One order gets checked across several providers. Another needs a replacement driver. A third has an ETA that suddenly looks suspicious, so somebody starts clicking, calling, and checking again. The carrier bill records none of that time.
BLS puts dispatcher wages around $24 an hour before benefits. Two people spending half their shifts on repetitive provider comparison can run roughly $50,000 a year.
That belongs in delivery ROI. Burq’s dispatch automation and delivery optimization are designed to take that repetitive search-and-compare work off the desk, which leaves dispatchers with the decisions that deserve a dispatcher.
Input 4: WISMO Volume
The next cost usually lands one floor over, where CX gets to answer for delivery.
“Where is my order?” can account for 20% to 40% of ecommerce support volume and more than half during peak periods. Once a person handles the ticket, the cost can reach $12.
At 10,000 monthly orders and a 15% WISMO rate, you’re looking at roughly $18,000 a month. That isn’t some separate customer-service expense, either. It belongs inside delivery ROI because the delivery created the question.
A customer with a useful ETA has less reason to ask for it. Branded tracking keeps the retailer in front of the customer, while support tools can handle exceptions before the inbox starts filling up.
Input 5: Repeat Purchase Rate
The fifth input is harder to spot because there’s no ticket, refund request, or extra invoice attached to it.
The customer simply doesn’t come back.
Split customers by their previous delivery experience, then compare 90-day repeat purchase rates. Put clean deliveries in one cohort and deliveries with an exception in another, then multiply the difference by average order value.
Before you know it, delivery ROI includes the revenue that delivery helped keep or helped lose. Keep in mind also that AlixPartners found 52% of consumers would leave a retailer after one or two poor delivery experiences.
Customers aren’t grading the provider separately from the store. They ordered from your brand, which is why our retail delivery platform treats the customer experience as part of the delivery operation itself.
Put the Five Inputs on One Sheet
You don’t need a companywide archaeology project to get a better delivery ROI number. Take one market and 90 days. Pull the failure rate, actual landed cost, dispatch hours, WISMO volume, and repeat purchase rate. Put them next to each other.
That’s when a cheap delivery starts telling the truth.
Maybe the rate really is lower. Great. But if failures rose, dispatch started babysitting orders, CX hired around the problem, and repeat purchase slipped, you didn’t lower delivery cost. You moved it around.
Burq Analytics gives retailers a way to see that operating picture alongside the tools used across grocery, floral, multi-location delivery, and enterprise operations.
That’s the delivery ROI number worth managing: what it cost to get the order there, what it took out of the business along the way, and whether the customer wanted to do it with you again.
Bring 90 days of delivery data and book a demo.
