By Nish George, CEO
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One of the top questions I hear from brand owners is, how much does fulfillment cost?
Most 3PLs make pricing way more convoluted than it needs to be. In this breakdown, I'll explain 3PL pricing—postage, pick & pack, storage, and more—for typical US domestic orders.
For US domestic, ground-speed orders weighing a couple pounds or less, expect to spend $10-14 in total end-to-end fulfillment costs.
This includes all fixed and variable costs to round-trip your stuff through a 3PL to your consumer's doorstep: pick & pack, postage, shipping supplies, storage, inbound, account management, and returns. This excludes manufacturing costs, air/sea freight from your manufacturer to your 3PL's dock, or customer-acquisition costs.
Notice that postage is the #1 logistics cost for every DTC brand, followed by pick & pack. When shopping across 3PLs, you'll be best served by focusing on those 2 categories above all else.
Postage is the #1 logistics cost for every DTC brand, followed by pick & pack.
Now for the secret sauce: how do you lower these costs?
Throughout my journey of saving Amazon $250MM per year in fulfillment costs, and now as I run a DTC 3PL serving several dozen brands, I've discovered 3 main levers to lower fulfillment costs that every DTC brand needs to know and discuss with their 3PL:
1. Increase Units per Order
Encourage basket-building with free shipping thresholds. If customers buy more per order, you distribute pick and postage costs across more items—dropping your per-unit cost significantly.
2. Use Ready-to-Ship Packaging
Send products to your 3PL already boxed and retail-ready. This reduces packing labor and can decrease DIM-weight-based postage.
3. Grow Order Volume
Higher order volume lowers your cost per order by spreading fixed fees and allowing your 3PL to optimize SKU slotting for faster pick times.
4. Optimize Shipping Zones
Brands with high order volumes or heavier SKUs can benefit from a multi-warehouse setup (e.g., East + West Coast), reducing postage by shipping from locations closer to your customers.
Do these numbers still feel too expensive for your brand? Are you only making $0.50-3.00 per unit sold after production and customer-acquisition costs? That usually means direct-to-consumer is not the best sales channel for your product, at least based on today’s US logistics landscape (which will change … I'm happy to discuss what's coming in our industry privately). In that case, your best sales channels might be traditional retail or wholesale. Just bear in mind that retailers typically expect you to sell to them for 50% less than retail price.
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Fetch Fulfillment is a New Jersey-based 3PL for brand owners who want direct-to-consumer fulfillment to be the least stressful part of their business. Most 3PLs are good at one thing, like shipping on-time, or having modern tech, or picking up the phone. What makes Fetch unique is that it's stellar at all 3: it provides high-end boutique-grade customer service -- as seen in its glowing reviews and +92 net promoter score -- combined with its real-time cutting-edge tech and well-managed operation, with 99.2% same-day shipping and 99.95% order fill-rate. The Fetch team lives by its motto: they are Your Brand's Best Friend.
