Two Australian fulfilment providers quote you. One says $5.00 per order. The other says $7.00 per order.
The cheaper one is frequently the more expensive one. This is not a trick — it is what happens when the advertised number describes a different set of things in each quote. One excludes storage. One applies a minimum monthly charge. One bills separately for account management. None of that appears in the headline.
The minimum monthly charge is the line that matters most to a small brand, and it is the one least likely to come up before you ask.
What a minimum monthly charge actually is
It is a floor. You are billed at least that amount each month regardless of how many orders you ship. If your usage comes to $180 and the minimum is $400, you pay $400.
Published Australian ranges put these at roughly $300 to $500 a month. Some providers apply $500 a month for account management on its own, separately from any usage.
Worth being clear about something first: a minimum is not automatically predatory. A provider that sets aside space, configures your SKUs, connects your store and trains staff on your packing requirements has incurred real cost before your first order ships. A floor is how that cost gets recovered from accounts that turn out to be smaller than expected.
The problem is not that minimums exist. It is what they do to a cost per order at low volume, and how rarely that gets spelled out.
The arithmetic nobody puts on the quote
A $300 to $500 monthly minimum, expressed as a cost per order:
| Orders per month | Minimum, per order |
|---|---|
| 50 | $6.00 – $10.00 |
| 100 | $3.00 – $5.00 |
| 150 | $2.00 – $3.33 |
| 300 | $1.00 – $1.67 |
| 500 | $0.60 – $1.00 |
| 1,000 | $0.30 – $0.50 |
Compare that to pick and pack itself, which sits at roughly $2.00 to $3.50 for the first item in an order.
At fifty orders a month, the minimum charge is two to three times the pick and pack fee. It is the largest single line in your fulfilment cost, and it appears nowhere in "from $2.50 per order".
At a thousand orders a month it is a rounding error. That is the point: the same clause is trivial for one brand and decisive for another, and the advertised rate cannot tell you which one you are.
Three more fixed lines that stack on top
A minimum is not the only charge that ignores your volume. Published Australian figures put the common ones at:
- Account management — roughly $100 to $500 a month
- Software or portal access — roughly $50 to $200 a month, which often applies even if you only log in occasionally
- Integration and setup — roughly $2,500 to $5,000 as a one-off for a standard Shopify or WooCommerce connection
Taken together, the recurring pair alone runs $150 to $700 a month. At 150 orders a month, that is another $1.00 to $4.67 per order before a single item has been picked.
Spread the setup fee across a first year and it adds roughly $208 to $417 a month on top of that.
Some providers fold these into the minimum rather than charging both. Others do not. You cannot tell from the outside, which is precisely why the question has to be asked directly.
Why the industry ended up here
The same arithmetic that makes providers decline high-SKU, low-volume brands is what produces minimums.
A fulfilment provider's revenue is driven by how many orders you ship. Its cost to serve you is driven by space, setup, system configuration and the attention your account needs — none of which scale down when your volume does. A quiet month costs them nearly as much as a busy one.
The minimum is how that gap gets closed. It is a rational response to a real problem. It is also, for a brand shipping under a hundred orders a month, frequently the reason outsourcing does not pay yet.
Five questions worth asking before you sign
Is there a minimum monthly charge, and what is the figure? Ask for the number, not a description of the policy. "It rarely applies" is not a number.
When does it start? Some providers waive the minimum during onboarding and apply it from month three or four. That changes the first-year maths considerably, and it is not usually volunteered.
What counts toward it? Whether storage, receiving and returns count toward meeting the minimum, or sit outside it, can shift the effective floor by several hundred dollars.
What else is charged monthly regardless of volume? Account management and software access are the two that appear most often. Ask for both by name.
What happens to it if my volume drops? Seasonal brands, in particular, need to know whether a quiet February is billed as a quiet February.
Get the answers in writing. Not because anyone is being dishonest, but because a figure repeated from memory after a phone call is not something you can compare against another quote three weeks later.
When a minimum is reasonable, and when it is not
A minimum is reasonable when it is disclosed before you commit, when the figure is specific, and when it reflects genuine setup and standby cost.
It is worth pushing back when it first appears in the contract rather than the conversation, when nobody can tell you what counts toward it, or when it sits alongside separate account management and software fees that are doing the same job twice.
The most useful signal is not the size of the number. It is whether the provider brings it up before you do.
Where we sit
We are a fulfilment provider, so read this with that in mind.
Any minimum that applies to your account is set out in your rate card before you commit — you will not meet one for the first time on an invoice. That is the whole of the commitment, and it is deliberately narrower than the ones you will see elsewhere, because a promise that breaks as a company grows is worse than no promise at all.
The calculator shows the published Australian market ranges for every line discussed here, including the fixed monthly charges that sit outside a per-order rate. It is built as a sanity check on any quote you receive, ours included.
If you want the full structure rather than one line of it, how fulfilment pricing works sets out every charge that can appear on a fulfilment invoice and where the surprises usually come from.