We get asked this question every week: which courier is actually the best? The honest answer is “it depends on the route, the weight, and what you're optimising for” — but that's not a useful answer. So we ran the numbers.
Between January and April 2026, we put 10,000 real shipmentsthrough 8 couriers across our merchant base, controlled for AWB weight (0.4–0.6 kg) and zone mix. Here's what we found.
The methodology
- 10,000 shipments total, ~1,250 per courier.
- Weights between 400g and 600g (volumetric and actual aligned).
- Origin distributed across Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad.
- Destination: representative mix of metros (40%), Tier-2 (35%), Tier-3 (25%).
- Same prepaid:COD ratio across all couriers (60:40).
Cost per shipment (zone-blended)
Surface mode, 0.5 kg base, zone-blended:
- Delhivery Surface — ₹47.20
- Xpressbees Surface — ₹48.10
- Ekart Surface — ₹49.30
- Ecom Express Surface — ₹51.80
- Shadowfax Surface — ₹54.50
- DTDC Surface — ₹58.40
- Bluedart Surface — ₹71.20
- Smartr Surface — ₹62.10
Delhivery wins on cost — predictable, given their scale. But the gap to Xpressbees and Ekart is small enough that route-specific pricing usually flips the order on individual SKUs.
Delivery TAT (metro-to-metro)
- Bluedart Express — 1.2 days avg
- Delhivery Express — 1.6 days
- Smartr — 1.8 days
- Xpressbees Express — 1.9 days
- Ecom Express — 2.1 days
- DTDC Plus — 2.3 days
- Shadowfax — 2.4 days
- Ekart — 2.8 days
Bluedart is fastest. It's also nearly 1.5× the cost of Delhivery. Worth it for high-AOV fragile shipments; overkill for ₹400 t-shirts.
NDR rate (first-attempt failure)
- Bluedart — 4.1%
- Delhivery — 6.8%
- Smartr — 7.2%
- Xpressbees — 8.4%
- Ecom Express — 9.1%
- DTDC — 10.3%
- Shadowfax — 11.7%
- Ekart — 13.2%
NDR rate is the metric most sellers ignore — and the one that quietly kills margin. Each NDR is a re-attempt fee, sometimes an RTO, and a refund headache. Bluedart's 4% vs Ekart's 13% is not a rounding error.
RTO rate (when NDR isn't recovered)
Of the NDR shipments, how many converted to RTO (return to origin)?
- Bluedart — 18%
- Delhivery — 24%
- Xpressbees — 26%
- Smartr — 28%
- Ecom Express — 32%
- DTDC — 35%
- Shadowfax — 38%
- Ekart — 41%
Total landed cost (cost + NDR + RTO impact)
Here's the metric most aggregators don't want you to compute. Per-100-shipments, including freight + NDR attempts + RTO freight + lost-margin estimate:
- Delhivery — ₹5,780
- Xpressbees — ₹5,920
- Bluedart — ₹7,440 (but fewer angry customers)
- DTDC — ₹7,890
- Shadowfax — ₹8,210
- Ekart — ₹8,940
So which one should you use?
Don't pick one. Use rules:
- Metro < 500g, value < ₹1500 → Delhivery Surface.
- Metro < 500g, value > ₹3000 or fragile → Bluedart Express.
- Tier-2/3, COD, value < ₹1000 → Xpressbees / Ekart with auto-NDR.
- Heavy (> 5kg) → DTDC Surface or Delhivery Heavy.
- NE / Kashmir / island pincodes → India Post fallback.
That's exactly what our auto-allocation engine does. You can override it per-rule; most merchants don't — the rules cover ~94% of orders correctly on the first try.
