The Cheapest Way To Ship A Heavy Winter Coat Or Jacket (With Pictures)

Winter coats and jackets can be expensive to ship since they tend to be bulky and heavy. Especially when made of materials such as wool or leather. Or if the jacket or coat contains studs, multiple zippers, or belts. In this post, we’ll go over the cheapest way to ship a heavy coat or jacket and show you the different shipping options.

Packing the Heavy Coat Or Jacket

Here, we will be shipping a women’s coat. The cost to ship your coat or jacket will primarily depend on the total weight, package’s dimensions, and how far your package has to travel. Sometimes one carrier will be more affordable than others.

The first thing you will need to do is to pack the coat or jacket as small and condensed as possible. Fold the coat and squeeze it into a plastic bag. Make sure to let all the air out as much as you can.

You will need to weigh and measure your package so make sure that you have a shipping scale and a measuring tape. This particular women’s coat is a size XS, made of 100% wool. It weighs 4 pounds.

A plain coat like this one without any embellishment generally does not require any additional padding or protection. Therefore, it will be fine to pack inside a plain polybag. Plain poly mailers usually weigh less than an ounce so they do not add much weight to the package.

You will want to round this number to the next ounce up so this package will be 4 pounds, 1 ounce to account for the shipping label and tape, if needed.

If your jacket or coat has studs or other delicate trimmings, you will want to use a box. Choose a box closest to the actual size of your item. You can reuse most boxes that you may have around.

Keep in mind that using a box will add more weight to your package. As earlier, you will want to round this number to the next ounce of 4 pounds and 12 ounces to account for tape and a shipping label. However, the cost to ship with a box may be surprisingly cheaper with certain carriers. You will see it when we buy the postage next.

Buying Your Postage

The cheapest way to ship a heavy coat or jacket will be to buy your postage from a shipping software that gives you commercial pricing. Commercial pricing will be much cheaper than what you will pay over the counter at your local post office.

We use Pirate ship for all our USPS postage. Recently, Pirate ship have added UPS as a carrier. We have gone through a step-by-step of how to use pirate ship linked below so check it out if you’re new to Pirate Ship.

The Cheapest Way To Ship A Heavy Winter Coat Or Jacket

We will be shipping this coat from Dallas, Texas to Brooklyn, NY to give you an idea of the shipping cost and to compare the shipping services. While most heavy-duty adult coats or jackets do not fit in USPS Priority Flat Rate boxes, perhaps a childrens or small jacket may. However, you will see below that Flat Rate boxes also tend to be more expensive so we will use an alternative shipping service.

Cost To Ship In A Polymailer

Once you enter your mailing addresses in Pirate ship, select the type of packaging to one as shown below. Enter your weight and bag dimensions.

You will then select “Get Rates”. Pirate Ship will automatically choose the cheapest shipping service.

Cost To Ship In A Box

Comparing the cost of shipping a polybag or box in this scenario, select a “Box or Rigid Packaging”. Remember to change the weight of the package.

You will see that in this particular instant, it is cheaper to ship in a box, even though it weighs more. However, the cheapest shipping service is UPS Ground this time, instead of USPS.

Cost To Ship A Heavy Coat From Texas To New York Compared

As mentioned earlier, your shipping cost may vary based on the package weight, dimensions, and distance. However, for this particular instance, we found that shipping our heavy coat in a box via UPS Ground gave us the cheapest shipping rate.

Package Type	Cost	Carrier
Polybag	$14.33	USPS
Box	$12.89	UPS
Priority Mail Flat Rate – Medium	$14.50	USPS
Priority Mail Flat Rate – Large	$20.05	USPS