The five fulfilment charges that don’t appear on the rate card
The charges 3PLs put in the contract rather than the price list, and the five questions that flush them out before you sign.
Tips & guides
Most 3PLs will not return your call at this size. Here is an honest look at every option a small UK seller actually has, with real numbers.

Type “UK order fulfilment” into Google and you will find dozens of 3PLs with beautiful websites. Fill in their quote forms as a seller doing 100 orders a month and watch what happens: most never reply, and the ones that do quote a monthly minimum spend, a setup fee in the hundreds, or a polite “come back when you are doing 2,000 a month”.
That is not because your business is too small to matter. It is because most fulfilment warehouses are built around automation lines and account managers whose economics only work at volume. At 100 orders a month you are real, growing and profitable, and you still have exactly four options. Here they all are, including the ones that are not us.
At 100 orders a month you are packing three to four parcels a day, which sounds trivial until you price your own evenings. Call it 15 minutes per order across picking, packing, labelling and the post office run: that is 25 hours a month, plus packaging bought at retail prices and postage bought at counter rates. If your time is worth anything at all, DIY fulfilment usually costs more than outsourcing it, and it is the first thing that stops you growing, because every new order is more of your night gone.
FBA is genuinely good at what it does. If you sell only on Amazon, it may be the right answer, and we tell sellers that to their faces. The trouble starts when you sell anywhere else: multi-channel fulfilment fees rise sharply, your stock is stuck in a channel-specific system, storage fees ramp aggressively in Q4 exactly when you need space, and a suspended listing can strand your entire inventory. FBA is a sales channel’s warehouse, not your warehouse.
The household-name 3PLs run superb operations, for the clients they accept. Typical entry terms are 1,000–2,000 orders a month minimum, a setup or onboarding fee, integration charges and a 12-month contract. If you are at 100 orders, you will either be declined or quoted a monthly minimum spend that means paying for volume you do not ship. Again: not villains, just built for a different customer.
This is the honest pitch. Angler Fulfilment was built specifically for sellers from 100 orders a month upwards, because we think the sellers the big 3PLs turn away are the best clients in e-commerce: small enough to care, growing fast enough to matter.
Numbers, because a fulfilment article without numbers is an advert. On our published rate card, pick & pack at your volume is £1.10 for the first item and 25p per additional item. Postage is charged at our negotiated carrier rates, which are usually cheaper than what you can buy alone. A typical single-item parcel lands at £3.50–£5.50 all-in including postage. Storage is per shelf, pallet or bin location per week, and your first month’s stock stores free.
Rough monthly picture at 100 single-item orders: about £110 of pick & pack, plus postage at cost, plus a few pounds of storage. Compare that with 25 hours of your own time and retail-rate postage, and the maths usually speaks for itself.
Really. No minimum order volume, no minimum monthly spend. If you do 80 orders one month, you pay for 80 orders.
No. Rolling monthly terms with 30 days’ notice and no exit fees. We think a 3PL should keep clients by being good, not by holding stock hostage.
Onboarding takes up to 14 days from first call to first dispatch, including integrations. Most of that is preparing your product data properly; our 14-day onboarding checklist shows exactly what happens.
Your rate improves automatically: 95p per first item from 1,000 orders a month and 85p beyond that. You will never need to renegotiate to get the volume price.
The short version: at 100 orders a month you are not too small for professional fulfilment; you are just talking to the wrong warehouses. Send us five details and you will have an itemised quote against our published rate card within one working day.
Keep reading
The charges 3PLs put in the contract rather than the price list, and the five questions that flush them out before you sign.
Everything to have ready before your stock leaves the building.
Send us five details and we send back a fully itemised quote against our published rate card, within one working day, with no sales call unless you ask for one.
Request a quote