Behind the Hipobuy price card: the estimator’s own fields

The estimator page makes two kinds of request. Pressing Inquire sends one POST to an address ending in international2, which returns every line for the destination in one list. Opening Show More on a card sends one GET to internationalDetails with that line’s id and the weight.

We did not call these by hand for the main snapshot. A real browser drove the page for six countries on 16 October 2026, and we saved the responses the page itself received, then fetched the Show More record for each of the 90 lines that could carry the parcel.

Field names below are copied from those responses. They are internal names, not labels Hipobuy has explained.

The first set is four yuan amounts that add up to originEstCargoCost: weightFee for the weight charge, fuelFee, operateFee and fixedFee. On US AIR USPS-ZF1 they were 90, 30, 6.67 and 0, total 126.67 CNY. A separate field, originEstCargoCost1, repeats the weight charge alone.

No figure from this set appears anywhere on the estimator page: not on the card, not in Show More, not in a tooltip. Hipobuy has not published what the set is used for.

Across all 90 lines, operateFee was 6.67 and fixedFee was 0 every time. fuelFee ranged from 0 on 25 lines to 113 CNY on IT AIR DPD-KD1.

The second set mirrors the first. Its fields carry a Raise suffix: weightFeeRaise, fuelFeeRaise, operateFeeRaise, fixedFeeRaise, adding up to estCargoCost. On US AIR USPS-ZF1: 135, 45, 10.01 and 0, total 190.01 CNY.

Each part of the second set was 1.5 times the matching part of the first, on every one of the 90 lines, with one line showing 1.5001 from rounding. We only report the ratio; the suffix is a field name, and Hipobuy has not said what it stands for.

The second set is not shown in yuan either, but its dollar conversion is: it is the struck-through figure on the card and every amount in Show More.

Dollar fields end in Curr: weightFeeCurr, fuelFeeCurr, operateFeeCurr, fixedFeeCurr and the total totalFeeCurr. They are the second set multiplied by the display rate, 0.1733 dollars per yuan on 16 October 2026 (0.1734 on one line from rounding).

estTotalExpressCost holds the same total as totalFeeCurr, as text. That is the struck figure. The Show More record repeats the per-parcel parts as fuelFeeRate and operateFeeRate, and the weight prices as headWeightUnitPriceK and continueWeightUnitPriceK.

estTotalExpressCostDiscount is the bold figure. On all 90 lines it equalled three quarters of weightFeeCurr plus fuelFeeCurr plus operateFeeCurr, within one cent. In plain words: a quarter comes off the dollar weight charge and nothing comes off fuel or operating cost.

One more field sits in the page code but stays out of sight. estTotalCost1Curr fills a tooltip labelled “Estimated Shipping Charges”, attached to a help icon that the page hides. Its value was three quarters of weightFeeCurr on every line: 17.55 on US AIR USPS-ZF1. The companion field estSurcharge, “Estimated Over Limit Charges”, was empty everywhere.

These relations describe the data we received. They are not a published formula, and they do not tell you what the parcel page will charge.

Several fields carry no money but explain the others. discountType was FIXED_DISCOUNT on all 90 lines and couponAmount was empty. headWeightDiscount and continueWeightDiscount were 1, which suggests no extra weight-price discount was in play, though Hipobuy does not define them.

serviceFee and insuranceFee were 0, consistent with the free agent service on the fees page and with paid protection being chosen later. taxRequired was N. giveInsure and insurance describe free and paid protection, which a separate set of pages handles; we only note that they are there.

The table takes the line with the lowest bold figure in each of our six destinations and lays out the sets side by side. The second set is always one and a half times the first; the struck figure is always the second set in dollars; the gap between struck and bold moves with the share of fuel in the line.

For more lines, use the quote reader, which holds all 90.

Read the gap with the fuel figure in mind. Lines carrying a large fuel figure show the smallest gap, because the arithmetic leaves fuel undiscounted; the lowest German line is one of them.

The responses answer “what” and never “why”. They do not say what the first set is for, why the second set exists, whether the bold figure applies to every account, or whether the parcel page uses the same fields.

Those are fair questions to put to Hipobuy support at [email protected], with the line name, the date and the two prices from your card. The answers page has a short script for that message.

None of this makes a quote useless. It makes the bold figure a starting point that you confirm on the parcel page, rather than a price you can hold anyone to.