Ask any CFO or ops manager what they should do about rising transport costs and they’ll rattle off the list: fuel levy, minimum order values, delivery fees, cut frequency on low-volume accounts, review the routes nobody’s touched in years.

They know. They’ve known for a while.

So why hasn’t it happened?

Why Can’t Operators Just Set a Fuel Levy?

There’s a version of this story where operators are just slow to act, where the answer is urgency, or better process, or a harder conversation with leadership. That’s not usually what’s going on.

What’s actually happening is operators trying to make real commercial decisions, ones that affect customer relationships, pricing, and delivery commitments, without the data to back them up. In that position, hesitation isn’t weakness. It’s rational.

If you introduce a fuel levy and a customer pushes back, what do you say? If you tell an account they need to consolidate orders or pay a delivery fee, can you show them why? If your board asks whether the new pricing actually covers your costs, can you prove it? Without cost-to-serve data at a customer and route level, the honest answer to all three is no.

So the decision gets delayed. A review gets scheduled. Someone says they’ll look at it next quarter. And the margin erosion continues, quietly, consistently, at scale.

That hesitation isn’t about the fuel levy itself. It’s about being able to defend the number to the one customer who’s going to ask.

What’s Actually at Stake

This isn’t abstract. We’ve watched operators who moved early, with numbers behind them, have short, clean conversations with customers. We’ve watched the ones who waited either eat the cost, which compressed their margins, or roll out changes reactively with nothing to justify them, which damaged the relationship. Neither outcome is good, and both were avoidable.

Fuel levies, minimum order values, and delivery fees aren’t new ideas. They’re tools that well-run distribution businesses use to protect margin when input costs rise. The difference isn’t whether operators know about them. It’s whether they can defend the decision with a number instead of a shrug.

This isn’t just about total revenue growth either. Operators we work with who moved early on pricing didn’t necessarily grow their customer base. Some deliberately shrank it, trimming a handful of loose-margin accounts while protecting the profitable core. That’s a very different, and much healthier, position than growing revenue on the back of deliveries that cost more than they return.

What a Fuel Levy Looks Like in Practice

Take a fuel levy. On paper it’s simple: fuel costs rose, so a percentage gets passed through. In practice, most operators hesitate because the levy has to apply unevenly. A customer three streets from the depot doesn’t cost what one ninety minutes away costs. Applying a flat levy across both either overcharges the easy account or undercharges the expensive one.

With cost-per-route data, that stops being a guess. Tools like route planning and route optimisation don’t just reduce friction for schedulers and dispatchers, they cut fuel spend by reducing kilometres travelled and improve the accuracy of day-to-day delivery costing. You can set a levy that actually reflects distance and frequency, defend it account by account, and avoid the two outcomes that hurt most: undercharging the customers actually driving your cost, or overcharging the ones who aren’t.

Why the Data Question Matters More Than the Decision

You can have the conversation. When a customer pushes back on a fuel levy or a minimum order value, you can show them, specifically and transparently, what it costs to service their account. That’s not a sales pitch. It’s a business conversation between two parties who both have a stake in the relationship working.

You can sequence the decisions correctly. Not every account needs the same adjustment. Some need a frequency change. Some need a minimum order value. Some are fine as they are. Without the numbers, you’re applying blanket policies to a varied customer base. With proper cost-to-serve tracking in place, you’re making targeted decisions that protect the accounts worth protecting and restructure the ones that need it.

You stop second-guessing yourself. One of the most underrated costs of operating without data is the management time spent on decisions that should be straightforward. When the numbers are clear, the decision is usually clear too. It’s the ambiguity that slows everything down, not the decision itself.

The Questions Worth Asking Right Now

• Do you know which delivery runs are profitable and which aren’t?
• Could you justify a fuel levy to your top ten accounts with data, not just an explanation?
• Do you have a clear picture of which customers would be hit hardest by a minimum order policy, and how much it would recover?
• When did you last review whether your delivery fees, if you charge them, actually reflect your current costs?

The same logic applies to a minimum order value. Without knowing which accounts sit below it and by how much, any number you pick is arbitrary. With the data, it’s a threshold you can defend line by line.

None of these are trick questions. They’re the ones your accounts will eventually ask anyway.

If those questions are difficult to answer, the issue isn’t the decision. It’s that the information needed to make it confidently doesn’t exist yet.

Rising costs are a pressure every distribution business is feeling. The operators managing it well aren’t doing anything dramatically different. They’re making decisions from a position of clarity instead of estimation.

They know what it costs to deliver an order. They know which accounts are profitable at that cost. And when they need to have a hard conversation with a customer, they walk in with numbers, not just a vague reference to how tough the market’s been.

That’s the difference. And it starts with getting the data right.

Rising costs aren’t going away, and neither is the pressure to defend your pricing with more than a shrug. Talk to us about your pricing and cost-to-serve, or see the numbers for yourself first: try SolBox free for 30 days and start making your delivery runs more profitable.