Most of what gets written about shipping carriers is opinion, or a survey of what shoppers say they would do. This article is neither. It is a count of what a few dozen online shops actually did in October 2026: which carriers they had switched on, which carriers their parcels went out with, and where those parcels went. The numbers are OrderKrab's own - every order packed and every shipping label created through it that month. S1
Nine in ten shops run more than one carrier
The first thing the data says is how rare a single-carrier shop is. Of the shops that packed at least one order in October, about one in ten had a single carrier switched on. Most had two or three, and one in six had four or more. S1
| Carriers switched on | Share of shops | Share of orders packed in October |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | 43% | 29.2% |
| 3 | 41% | 29.1% |
| 4 or more | 16% | 41.7% |
OrderKrab production data S1. Carriers switched on in each shop's account on 5 November 2026; orders packed 1–31 October 2026, Vilnius time. Rows are grouped so that each covers at least five shops. Store pick-up is not counted as a carrier. DPD Fresh is counted with DPD, Omniva's two options as one, and InPost's three routes as one.
“Switched on” means the carrier is connected and active in the shop's account, which is what makes its delivery methods available to that shop. It does not prove that every customer saw every carrier at checkout: a shop may use one carrier only for parcels abroad, or only for heavy ones. What it does show is that almost every shop decided one contract was not enough to run on.
Every busy shop runs at least two
Split the same shops by how many orders they packed in October and the pattern is not what you might expect. Small shops do not run one carrier and big shops many. Four in five of the shops that packed 50 orders or fewer also have two or more switched on, at a median of three. S1
| Orders packed in October | Share of shops | Share of orders | Shops with 2+ carriers | Median carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1–50 | 30% | 0.8% | 82% | 3 |
| 51–300 | 24% | 3.7% | 78% | 2 |
| Over 300 | 46% | 95.5% | 100% | 3 |
OrderKrab production data S1. Bands are the dashboard's own, with the two above 300 orders merged so that each covers at least five shops. Carriers switched on as of 5 November 2026; orders packed 1–31 October 2026.
What the table does show is the other end. Not one of the shops that packed more than 300 orders in October relies on a single carrier. Between them they packed 95.5% of the month's orders, they run three carriers at the median, and about two thirds of them run three or more. S1
No carrier carries a third of the parcels
Across these shops, October's carrier labels went out with ten different carriers. The largest of them carried 31.3%. The four largest - DPD, LP Express, Omniva and Venipak, in alphabetical order - carried 80.6% between them, and the other six 19.4%. S1 The carriers are not spread evenly across shops either: the most widely used one printed labels for three shops in four, the next two for two in three and three in five, and no carrier was used by all of them. S1
This was not a one-month accident. The set of shops changed a lot between February and October 2026, and the split barely moved:
| Month (2026) | Largest carrier's share | Four largest | Carriers used |
|---|---|---|---|
| February | 29.8% | 83.5% | 8 |
| March | 29.4% | 83.7% | 9 |
| April | 32.5% | 85.4% | 9 |
| May | 30.8% | 83.4% | 9 |
| June | 32.0% | 83.9% | 10 |
| July | 30.8% | 78.5% | 10 |
| August | 30.5% | 78.8% | 10 |
| September | 35.8% | 80.1% | 10 |
| October | 31.3% | 80.6% | 10 |
OrderKrab production data S2. Labels created through OrderKrab, store pick-up excluded, carriers merged as in the first table. The shops packing changed month to month, so this is not a fixed panel. Months before February 2026 are left out: there were too few shops, and one or two of them dominated.
In every one of those nine months, the largest carrier had between 29.4% and 35.8% of labels, while the shops behind them changed. S2 A split that holds while the mix of shops changes underneath it says more than any single month does.
It also looks like the market these shops sell in. On Lietuvos paštas's own figures, by revenue rather than parcels, Lithuania's courier market in 2024 was led by Lietuvos paštas with 24.5%, DPD Lietuva with 19.8% and Venipak Lietuva with 12.5%. S6 Neither the national market nor these shops' labels has a carrier with a third of the volume.
Put that from a single-carrier shop's side, and treat it as reasoning from aggregate figures rather than a measurement of your own customers: even the largest carrier in this data carried fewer than a third of the parcels. The split mixes two decisions - which carriers each shop switched on, and which of them its customers picked - so it is not a measure of shopper preference. But it is hard to square with the idea that one network is what everyone expects.
One order in five leaves the country
All the shops are registered in Lithuania, and 78.1% of their October orders stayed there. The other 21.9% went to 42 countries. S1 Foreign orders are a small share of most shops' volume, but they are not confined to a few exporters: they reach a lot of shops a few parcels at a time.
| Destination | Shops that sent at least one order |
|---|---|
| Lithuania | 100% |
| Germany | 35% |
| Latvia | 32% |
| Estonia | 30% |
| Ireland | 27% |
| France | 24% |
| United Kingdom | 24% |
| Netherlands | 22% |
| Poland | 22% |
| Italy | 19% |
| Spain | 19% |
| Sweden | 19% |
OrderKrab production data S1, orders packed 1–31 October 2026 by delivery country. The eleven foreign countries reached by the most shops. Order counts per country are left out: a few shops can make up most of one country's parcels.
Latvia and Estonia make the point best. About a third of the shops sent orders to each in October, yet the two countries together took just over 1% of the month's orders. S1 Those are the parcels a shop prices least carefully, and they are where the market differs most from the one next door. In a 2024 Gemius study, one parcel-terminal network was used by around 70% of Estonian respondents and 15% of Latvian ones, while another was used by 90% of Latvians and almost 80% of Estonians. S7 The network your Lithuanian customers know is not necessarily the one your Latvian customers do.
Price differs by destination as much as preference does. DPD's own 2026 surcharge list charges a remote-area surcharge of €8.00 to the Netherlands, €22.50 to Italy or the UK, €32.50 to Spain and €47.50 to Portugal, for the same service. S8 A carrier that is right for Vilnius is a separate question from one that is right for Lisbon, and 42 destinations are 42 such questions.
What shoppers say, for comparison
Survey data points the same way, with the usual caveat that people's answers are not their behaviour. Geopost's 2025 E-shopper Barometer - 30,700 interviews in 22 European countries, run by the group that owns DPD - found the share of e-shoppers who say it matters which delivery company is used rising from 71% to 76%. S4 In a March 2026 survey of 8,000 shoppers in eight Western European markets, none of them Baltic, run by the shipping platform Sendcloud - a direct competitor of ours - 42.87% said they “feel frustrated when they're limited to just one carrier”. S5
And across Europe, Copenhagen Economics' 2026 study for the European postal operators' association found “an average of nine distinct delivery operators are displayed per country” across domestic e-commerce sites. S3 That is per country across many sites, not per site, but it is the range of carriers a European shopper meets when buying online. The fuller case - coverage, surcharges, strikes and outages, carrier quality - is in why one shipping carrier is never enough.
How to use this in your own shop
None of the numbers above is a target. They are a picture of what other shops settled on, and the useful thing to do with them is run the same count on your own orders.
- 1
Count where your orders go
Export three months of orders by delivery country. In the October data above, one order in five left Lithuania. S1 Any country with a steady trickle is a lane worth pricing on its own.
- 2
Cover the networks your customers already use
Parcel terminals are the most used delivery method in all three Baltic states, but which network people use differs by country. S7 Start with the networks your own customers ask for, country by country.
- 3
Price each lane, not each carrier
Get rates per destination and parcel size from two or three carriers, with every surcharge. A cheap domestic rate says nothing about what the same carrier charges for Spain. S8
- 4
Add a second carrier before you need it
Connecting a carrier takes a contract, credentials and a test label. That is a quiet week's work, and a hard one to fit in during a strike or a sale.
- 5
Count again in six months
Destinations and volumes move. The split in this data held across nine months, but each shop's own mix is the one that matters for its contracts.
How we counted
- Source. OrderKrab's production data, read on 5 November 2026 from an internal reporting copy of the database. S1,S2
- Shops. Accounts that packed at least one order in the month. One account can connect more than one store. In October 2026: a few dozen accounts, all registered in Lithuania, most of them on Shopify and a few on WooCommerce. S1
- Orders packed. Orders whose packing was completed in OrderKrab, dated by the day they were packed, in Vilnius time. Demo orders are excluded.
- Labels. Shipping labels created through OrderKrab, attributed to the carrier they were created with. Store pick-up, where the customer collects the order and no parcel is sent, is excluded from every carrier figure.
- Carriers. Counted as brands: DPD Fresh with DPD, Omniva's two options as Omniva, InPost's three routes as InPost.
- Carriers switched on. Carriers active in each account on 5 November 2026, a snapshot set against October's orders. There is no history of when each was switched on.
- Destinations. The delivery country on the order.
- What is not here. Which carrier each shop's customers picked when offered several, and the split between parcel lockers and courier delivery. Neither is in the data this article was built from.
- Privacy. Aggregates only. No shop is named, totals of shops, orders and labels are left out because the sample is small, and every figure covers at least five shops.