Ask a 3PL what fulfilment costs and you get a rate card. Ask what it costs for a clothing brand and the honest answer is different, because apparel loads three lines of that rate card harder than almost any other category.
None of it is a surcharge. It is the same rate card everybody gets. Apparel just consumes it differently.
One style is not one SKU
A single t-shirt design in five sizes and four colours is twenty stock lines. Add a second colourway next season and you are at twenty-five before you have designed anything new.
This is the number most apparel founders underestimate when they first ask for a quote, and it is the number that changes what a warehouse quotes back. Two brands can both ship two hundred orders a month, hold the same total units, and cost very different amounts to run: one has fifteen SKUs, the other has two hundred and fifty.
The second brand needs more pick locations, more careful picking, and more of the warehouse's attention per order. Providers who price per pick line rather than per order will show you that difference directly on the invoice. Providers who do not will show it in the rate they quote you in the first place.
If you are told your SKU count does not affect pricing, ask again. It affects theirs.
Storage: light, but wide
Clothing is light. Founders reasonably assume storage will be cheap, and per kilogram it is.
Storage is not billed per kilogram. Published Australian pallet rates run roughly A$3 to A$7 per pallet per week, which is about A$13 to A$30 per pallet per month, and a pallet is a footprint rather than a weight. A pallet of winter coats and a pallet of bricks cost the same to store.
The apparel problem is not weight, it is spread. Two hundred and fifty SKUs across a few hundred units means a lot of part-full locations. If your provider bills per pallet, you can pay for full pallets while using a third of each one. Per shelf, per bin or per cubic metre usually suits a wide, shallow range better, and it is worth asking which unit you are being quoted in before comparing two numbers.
Season changeover makes this worse in a specific way. Last season's stock does not disappear when the new range lands; for a period you are paying to store both. That overlap is a real cost and it is easy to leave out of a forecast.
Pick and pack: the base fee does the work
Australian pick and pack rates sit at roughly A$2.00 to A$3.50 for the first item in an order, with each additional item in the same parcel adding around A$0.40 to A$1.50.
Apparel orders are usually one or two items. That means the base fee carries almost your entire picking cost, and the cheaper per-additional-item rate barely applies. A homewares brand shipping four items per order spreads that base fee across more units; you do not.
There is a second effect that does not appear on any rate card. Picking the right garment is harder than picking the right box. Size 10 and size 12 of the same style in the same colour sit next to each other, look identical at a glance, and produce a return when confused. This is why barcode verification at the pack bench matters more for apparel than for most categories, and it is a fair question to ask before you commit: is every item scanned against the order, or is accuracy a matter of someone being careful?
Returns: the line that decides whether the numbers work
This is where apparel separates from every other category.
Apparel return rates run at roughly twenty to forty per cent, against an Australian ecommerce average that sits well below that, and fit or sizing causes about half of them. Returns processing is charged per item, at published Australian ranges of roughly A$3.00 to A$8.00 depending on how much inspection and grading is involved.
Put those together on a brand shipping two hundred orders a month at a twenty-five per cent return rate. That is fifty garments coming back every month, at three to eight dollars each: somewhere between A$150 and A$400, before you count the postage on the return leg or the units that come back unsellable.
For a lot of apparel brands, returns processing lands at around a quarter of the total fulfilment bill. It is also the line most often left out when founders estimate what outsourcing will cost, because it is the only line driven by something that happens after the order ships.
Two consequences worth sitting with. First, any quote you receive is incomplete until you have put your own return rate against it. Second, the cheapest way to reduce this cost is not to negotiate the per-item rate down; it is to return fewer garments in the first place, which is a product and sizing problem rather than a logistics one.
What this means when you ask for a quote
A useful apparel quote needs four numbers from you, and giving them up front is the difference between a real rate card and a guess:
- SKU count, not unit count. This drives storage layout and picking method.
- Average items per order. For apparel it is usually between one and two, and it decides how much of your cost is base fee.
- Your actual return rate, by month if you have it. If you have never measured it, that is the first thing worth measuring.
- How your stock arrives: cartons or pallets, and how often. Inbound is charged per pallet at roughly A$14 to A$50, and a brand receiving monthly drops pays that far more often than one receiving quarterly.
The figures above are published Australian market ranges compiled from provider guides and pricing pages, not Parcelo's rates. They are there so you can judge whether a quote you receive is reasonable. Our pricing page explains how each line is built, and the calculator will put your own volumes, SKU count and return rate against these ranges before you talk to anyone.
If your range is wide and your returns are high, that is not a reason to be quoted badly. It is a reason to be quoted honestly, on the numbers that actually drive your cost.