Splitting shipments by hand
A small calculator that splits a high value gift card order into envelopes that each stay under the insured limit, and shows the postage before anyone packs.
- Context
- Ecommerce, customer service operations
- Role
- Product Owner
- Date
- April 2026
The short version
- The problem
- Customer Success split high value gift card shipments by hand to stay under the insurance limit.
- What I did
- Turned the rules into a small calculator, built with AI help and shaped until the team could use it quickly.
- What it was worth
- No more manual arithmetic per shipment, and nothing over the limit by accident.
- The call
- A small tool now beat a backlog request later.
What changed
Someone worked out by hand how to split a high value gift card shipment so each envelope stayed under the 5,000 kronor insured value.
A calculator that does the split, weights the envelopes and shows the postage before anyone packs anything.
Problem
I saw this on an onboarding tour in my third week. Customer Success were splitting a large gift card order into envelopes by hand, because each letter has to stay under the 5,000 kronor insured value, and the split also has to allow for the weight of the cards, the envelopes and the packaging. Doing that arithmetic per shipment was slow, and it was easy to end up with an envelope over the limit, or with more envelopes than the order needed.
Approach
Nobody had asked for anything. I turned the packing rules into a small calculator, with AI writing the code, and kept reshaping the interface until Customer Success could use it quickly without me explaining it. Enter the order and it gives the split, the weight of each envelope and the postage, before anyone packs anything.
Outcome
The arithmetic stopped being a person's job. Shipments stay inside the insurance rules without using more envelopes than they need, and packing got quicker. It was a small tool made straight away, which beat a backlog request that would have waited behind everything else.