Are Shipping Costs Impacting Your EBITDA?

Why logistics costs are showing up in earnings calls, and what it means for your margins

Shipping used to live in operations. Now it shows up in financial results.

Across retail, ecommerce, and consumer businesses, companies are increasingly calling out shipping and logistics costs as drivers of margin pressure in earnings reports, investor filings, and executive commentary. What was once a background expense is now a material input to EBITDA.

This is not a temporary trend. It’s a structural shift.

Shipping Costs Are Now a Financial Story

Across industries, we’re seeing consistent language used to describe shipping in financial reporting: 

• Logistics costs impacting profitability
• Fulfillment expenses driving margin pressure
• Transportation volatility affecting forecasting

This is happening because shipping has changed in two fundamental ways. First, it has scaled. As companies expand ecommerce and direct fulfillment, shipping costs grow directly with revenue.

Second, it has become less predictable. Pricing is no longer confined to an annual rate increase. It now moves throughout the year, driven by surcharges, accessorials, and carrier-specific adjustments.

The result is a cost structure that is harder to control and increasingly visible at the level of company financial performance that shareholders care about. 

From Cost Pressure to Pricing Complexity

For many ecommerce companies, rising shipping costs are not new. What’s changed is where those costs are coming from, and how much control shippers actually have.

Consider Revolve Group. In its most recent 10K filing, the company points directly to external carrier dynamics as a driver of cost volatility:

“Volatility in the global oil markets… has resulted… in higher fuel prices, which many shipping companies pass on to their customers by increasing fuel surcharges. We have experienced such increased shipping costs…”

The implication is clear. Shipping costs are rising not because of internal inefficiency, but because carriers are adjusting pricing in response to factors outside the shipper’s control. For companies like Revolve that compete on fast, free delivery, passing those costs through to customers is not always viable.

Revolve is a unique case, absorbing high shipping and return costs is part of its growth strategy, enabling a premium customer experience without relying on discounting. That dynamic becomes more complex as pricing models evolve. As carrier pricing becomes more dynamic and less predictable, sustaining that model will depend on tight alignment across CX, marketing, and shipping to ensure those costs continue to translate into profitable demand.

In their most recent 10K filing, FIGS highlights the broader shift in shipper-carrier dynamics:

“Changes to the terms of our shipping arrangements or the imposition of surcharges, surge pricing or accessorials… may… adversely impact our margins and profitability.”

This is not just cost inflation. It is a transition to a pricing model built on layered fees: fuel surcharges, delivery area surcharges, dimensional pricing, and demand-based adjustments that make total cost harder to forecast and manage.

By the time these changes show up in financial performance, the underlying drivers are already embedded in the carrier contract.

For platforms like ThredUp, for example, the dependency runs even deeper. Their operations rely on carriers for inbound shipments, outbound deliveries, and internal transfers, often under volume-based pricing structures. (Source: ThredUp 10K Filing). 

That creates a second layer of exposure: shipping costs are influenced not only by rates, but by how closely actual volume and service mix align with contracted assumptions.

Taken together, these examples point to a structural reality:

Shipping costs are no longer just a function of volume. They are a function of pricing models, contract structures, and carrier behavior.

Why Shipping Is Moving Up the Financial Stack

Several forces are driving this shift.

Ecommerce growth has increased parcel exposure across nearly every consumer-facing business. What was once a marginal cost is now a core component of the cost-to-serve.

At the same time, carriers have expanded the use of accessorial charges. These fees, often tied to geography, package characteristics, or service conditions, introduce variability that is difficult to model in advance.

Pricing itself is becoming more dynamic. Instead of a single annual increase, carriers are implementing continuous adjustments throughout the year, often targeting specific services or shipment types.

Lastly, customer expectations continue to rise. Fast, free shipping is now table stakes in many categories, meaning companies absorb cost increases rather than pass them on.

The result is a more complex cost structure that sits directly at the intersection of operations and finance.

The Core Problem: No Shared View of Cost-to-Serve

Despite its growing impact, shipping is still often managed in silos.

Finance teams see total spend and margin impact. Supply chain teams manage carriers, service levels, and execution. There is often no shared model that connects those perspectives; no clear view of cost-to-serve by order, customer, or channel.

Without that alignment, shipping costs are managed reactively. Issues surface after margins compress, not before.

Why This Becomes an EBITDA Problem

Shipping is one of the largest variable costs in an ecommerce-driven business, and one of the least controlled.

As companies grow, shipping costs grow with them, but inefficiencies scale as well:

• Free shipping policies erode margin when carrier costs spike
• Suboptimal zone distribution increases cost per order
• Misaligned contracts fail to reflect actual shipping behavior

Individually, these factors may seem manageable. Collectively, they show up in EBITDA.

They also introduce volatility. When costs fluctuate throughout the year and drivers are not fully understood, forecasting becomes more difficult and margin predictability declines.

What an Integrated Shipping Strategy Looks Like

The companies adapting to this shift are not treating shipping as a standalone function.

They are treating it as a cross-functional system that connects:

• Finance (cost, margin, forecasting)
• Operations (execution, service levels)
• Carrier strategy (contracts, pricing structures)

In practice, that means:

• Modeling cost-to-serve at a granular level
• Aligning carrier agreements to actual shipping profiles
• Monitoring performance continuously, not annually
• Linking shipping decisions directly to financial outcomes

This is not about reducing shipping costs in isolation. It is about understanding how shipping impacts profitability, and managing it accordingly.

Get your free guide to implementing integrated shipping, complete with operational examples, here. 

What CFOs Should Be Asking

If shipping costs are showing up in your financial reporting, impacting margins, or complicating forecasting, the shift has already happened. The question is not whether shipping is affecting EBITDA; it’s how well you understand and manage that impact.

To get started, CFOs should consider the following: 

• Do we know our true cost-to-serve by order or channel?
• Are our carrier contracts aligned to our current shipping profile?
• How much of our margin pressure is driven by surcharges and accessorials?
• Are we managing shipping as a strategic lever, or reacting after the fact?

Bottom Line

Shipping is no longer just an operational expense.

It is a financial lever that directly influences EBITDA.

As carrier pricing becomes more dynamic and cost structures more complex, the companies that treat shipping as a strategic function grounded in data, aligned across teams, and actively managed, will be better positioned to protect margins and scale profitably.

Schedule a call with LJM’s Executive Shipping Advisory

If you want a clearer view of how shipping is impacting your margins, we analyze cost-to-serve across carriers, zones, and service mix and identify where your cost structure can be improved.