Lara Guevara, a supply-chain expert with 17 years of experience, shows DTC brands how they overpay 3PL fees. One brand paid $124K extra annually because it kept low-volume rates after growing to 8,000 orders per month; a 25-minute renegotiation saved $10K monthly. She provides benchmark prices for seven fee categories and a weekend audit checklist to find what you're overpaying.
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How many line items are on your 3PL invoice right now? 10, 15, 20? Each one of those is eating your margin, and most of the time nobody is ever questioned a single one. I worked with a brand last year doing around 8,000 orders a month, solid team, good 3PL relationships, no drama, but they were overpaying $124K a year, not because their 3PL was bad, not because the rates were a scam, because they'd never at once ask for a rate review. And in this video, I'm breaking down every single fee on a standard 3PL invoice, what it means, what's normal, what's excessive, and exactly how to push back. By the end of this, you'll have a checklist and a language to go have that conversation. I'm Lara, 17 years in supply chain from enterprise to DTC, and the one thing I've seen consistently Across brands of every size is this: founders are great at negotiating product cost. They'll fight for every cent on a unit price, but the 3PL invoice, it just gets paid. Part of it is just fulfillment feels complicated. The invoices are dense, the line items have industry-specific names, and the 3PL rep is always so nice, so you just trust it. Today we're changing that. I'm going to walk you through the 7 fee categories you'll find on almost every 3PL invoice, and then I'll give you benchmark ranges for each one. Then I'll show you how to audit yours and what to do with what you find. And a quick heads up, this video connects directly to the finance side of your business. The 3PL invoice is usually paid by finance, but they rarely know which fees are negotiable and which ones are just how fulfillment works. So if you have a finance team or ops team, share this video with them too. Okay, 7 fees. Let's break them down. Fee number 1, pick fees. A pick fee is charged every time someone at the warehouse physically picks an item off the shelf to fulfill an order. It sounds simple, but it adds up fast. If you're selling a 3-item bundle and getting charged $0.45 per pick, That's $1.35 just in peak fees before anything else happens. Normal range is about $0.20 to $0.50 per item. If you're paying more than $0.45 and you're doing more than 2,000 orders a month, that is negotiable. The driver here is SKU complexity and peak path efficiency. High SKU, low velocity brands pay more. High volume brands with simple SKUs can negotiate much more aggressively. Fee number 2: pack fees. Pack fees cover the labor and the materials involved in packaging the order— the box, the tape, the void fill, the insert. Normal range is $1.50 to $3 per order. If you're on a standard mailer and getting charged $2.75, that's on the high side. If it includes a branded box and custom tissue, $3 might be totally fair. The key thing to watch here is whether your packaging is standard or custom. Custom packaging takes more handling time, and some 3PL charge you for that without explaining that it's variable. Fee number 3, storage fees. Storage is usually charged monthly per pallet or cubic foot for the space your inventory occupies. About $15 to $35 per pallet per month is standard. Where people get burned is minimum charges. Some 3PLs charge for a minimum number of pallets even if your inventory barely fills one. Also, watch for bin or shelf-level storage that can look shit per unit but balloon it if you have a lot of SKUs sitting in small quantities. The key question to ask is simple: how exactly is storage calculated on my invoices? per pallet, per cubic foot, and is there a minimum? Fee number 4: receiving fees. Receiving fees cover the labor for checking in your inventory when it arrives at the warehouse. That includes unloading the truck, verifying quantities, and scanning items into the system. You'll typically see this charge either per pallet, around $25 to $50, or per unit, about $0.2 to $0.4. The per pallet model works in your favor when you're shipping pallets of the same SKU. The per unit model hurts when you have high SKU count. Brands that frequently receive mixed SKU pallets need to watch this one carefully. It can be quite margin killer. Fee number 5, special handling. This category has the most variants. Special handling covers anything beyond standard standard pick and pack. Kitting, bundling, labeling, re-bagging, adding inserts, cards, stickering— normal range is about $0.25 to $2 per unit. But here's the key: what counts as special handling versus standard service depends entirely on how your contract is written. I've seen brands charge $1.50 per unit for special handling that was just adding a sticker to a bag. That same task at the different 3PL was included in the pack fee. If you do any kitting or bundling, audit this line item specifically. It's often where the creative billing lives. Fee number 6, return processing. Every return that comes back to the warehouse costs money to process, receiving it, inspecting it, restocking it, or quarantining it. $2 to $5 per return is normal. If your return rate is around 5%, this is relatively small cost, but if you're apparel where returns can hit 20 to 30%, this line item deserves serious attention. Some 3PLs also charge extra for inspection reports or restocking decisions. Make sure you know what that $3 per return actually includes. Fee number 7: Account management and minimums. This is the catch-all category. Monthly minimums, account management fees, software or WMS fees, sometimes general service charges. Monthly minimums mean you pay a base fee even if your order volume dips below a certain threshold. This is common and not inherently bad. 3PLs need predictable revenue, but if your minimums were set when you launched and your business has grown, you may be locked into fees that no longer reflect the value you're providing as a customer. This is the fee category that most brands never revisit after signing the contract, and that's exactly why it's worth reviewing. Okay, here's the full benchmark table. Screenshot this, save it, put it in your next invoice. This is your benchmark. Anything outside these ranges isn't automatically wrong, but it absolutely warrants a conversation. Let me tell you what actually happened with the $124K brand. When they signed their VPL contract, they were doing about 800 orders a month. 3 years later, they were doing 8,000 orders a month. They had become one of their 3PL's most valuable accounts, but they were still paying rates set when they were a small customer. Pick fee, $0.45. Market rate for their volume is $0.28. That's $0.17 per pick. Pack fee is $2.75. Market rate, $1.85. That's $0.9 per order. Across 96K orders per year, that becomes $124K. And here's the important part. The 3PL knew the rates hadn't been reviewed. They just never brought it up because why would they? This is not a story about a bad vendor. It's a story about what happens when a contract runs on autopilot. The pattern I see most often: contract signed at low volume, brand grows, volume grows, 3PL relationship grows, rates never get revisited. Brand is now a high-value customer paying low-volume rates. Thousands of dollars a month in unnecessary spend. The good news, One 25-minute conversation fixed it. They renegotiated. The 3PL agreed immediately. They didn't want to lose the account. The brand saved about $10K per month going forward. All it took was someone deciding to look. Before you go into a conversation with your 3PL, you need to be prepared. Here are 5 questions that will get you what you need. First, what exactly does each fee cover? Second, How do I compare to other clients at my volume level? Third, what triggers additional or variable charges? Fourth, what would reduce this fee? Volume, changes to process, SKU simplification. And fifth, when is our next rate review scheduled? If there is no answer to that question, you just schedule one, put it on the calendar, make it recurring. Here is exactly what I need you to do this weekend. Pull the last 3 months of your 3PL invoice, categorize every line item into one of the 7 fee buckets we've talked about, compare each fee to the benchmark ranges, flag anything outside the normal range, and then calculate the annual impact. Don't just note that your peak fee is 0.45% instead of 0.28%. Calculate what that means across your full order volume. That number is your negotiation ammunition. You're not asking for a favor, you're showing them a business case. The brands that runs this audit every 6 to 12 months constantly find 10 to 20% savings every time. Your APL invoice is not fixed. It was negotiated once, probably when you were a lot smaller, and most of the time it has never been revisited. So this weekend pull your invoices, run the audit, calculate the annual impact, and schedule a rate review. The conversation is easier than you think, and the result is usually savings you never expected. If this was helpful, hit subscribe. I publish supply chain content every week built for the real DTC operators, and drop a comment below. What did you find when you looked at your invoice? I read every single comment. I also created an app to check your invoices. If you want to have an access to that, comment app and I will send it to you. See you next week.
