Researchers have developed RouteCost, a multi-stage framework for estimating shipping costs in e-commerce. The framework takes into account various factors such as destination demand mix, billable weight, and surcharges to provide more accurate estimates. It consists of four stages: time-aware demand forecasting, fee-card-informed baseline pricing, residual correction, and proxy-based box-consolidation inference. RouteCost has been tested on a dataset of over 250,000 orders and has shown improved predictive quality and calibration while preserving interpretability. --- Why it matters: This matters to researchers in AI because it provides a more accurate method for estimating shipping costs, which is an important aspect of e-commerce. The framework's ability to handle complex factors such as surcharges and demand mix can be applied to other areas where cost estimation is critical. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16230