How HazMat Fees Are Applied

The hazardous materials (hazmat) fee is a package-level fee — it is charged once per package that contains a hazardous material. For example, if a shipment has five packages and three contain hazardous materials, the fee is charged three times. How many packages are flagged depends on your settings, described below.

When the Standard Box Sizes Feature Is Not in Use

Quote each item marked hazmat as shipping as its own package.

Found on the Quote Settings page, this option is the default setting. If the item is marked as hazardous material in its product-level settings, then each occurrence of it in the Cart will represent one package in the shipment, and the hazardous materials fee will be applied each time.

Combine quantities of the same item marked as hazmat into a single package before applying the hazmat fee.

This setting is also found on the Quote Settings page. When chosen, if an item is marked as a hazardous material and more than one of it is in the Cart, each one will be quoted as if it will ship as an individual package, but the hazmat fee will be applied only once. Although each item will be quoted as if it will ship as an individual package, choose this option if you will consolidate the items into one box or a fewer number of boxes than there are items.

Consider an example where Product A is marked as hazardous material, and there is a quantity of ten of it in the Cart.  In this case, the hazardous material fee will be applied once.

Example 2: Product A and Product B are both marked as hazardous materials, and the cart contains 10 of Product A and 5 of Product B. The hazmat fee is applied twice — once per distinct hazmat product.

When the Standard Box Sizes Feature Is in Use

The Standard Box Sizes feature is an optional add-on that calculates a packaging solution based on the boxes you have available and the contents of the cart. When enabled, the packaging algorithm determines the optimal box configuration. For carts containing hazardous materials, the algorithm tracks which boxes contain hazmat items and applies the hazmat fee accordingly.

If you want items marked as hazardous material to be quoted as shipping as their own package, locate the Standard Box Sizes Settings on the product shipping parameter page and enable the setting Ship as its own package.