Keep packing in-house or move to a 3PL?

At some point a shop that packs its own parcels asks whether someone else should. A third-party logistics provider - a 3PL - stores your stock, picks and packs each order, hands it to a carrier and takes the returns back in. You pay for each of those steps, and for the space your stock occupies while it waits to sell.

This article prices that choice from the 3PLs' own price lists, which is harder than it sounds, because most do not publish one. Omnipack and 3LP in Poland, byrd, and Smartposti's e-fulfillment service in Lithuania all quote on request. ^S8,S9,S7,S10 Five providers checked on 5 November 2026 put enough numbers on a page to work with: Venipak in Lithuania, DDT Logistics and PADPACK in Poland, FulFy in Germany and Fulfillable in the UK. ^{S1,S4,S5,S3,S6} They appear here because they publish, not as recommendations.

What a 3PL charges, line by line

Every 3PL bills the same handful of steps, whatever it calls them. byrd, which does not publish its rates, describes its model more plainly than most: receiving at a “cost per parcel or pallet”, storage “per storage shelf or pallet per month”, picking as an “order base price” plus a “cost per additional pick”, packing as “packaging workload” with materials optional, and shipping at cost plus “a service fee for comprehensive dispatch support”. ^S7 Here is what the five that publish charge for those steps.

Two pricing models sit in that table. Venipak sells a bundle: a fixed monthly price that includes a set number of orders, some space, some returns and goods insurance of up to €15,000. ^S1 The others itemise. A bundle is easy to budget and expensive if you use little of it. An itemised list costs little at low volume and is harder to predict, because every line moves with something different: orders, items per order, parcel weight, how long stock sits, how much comes back.

Read the units before the numbers. Storage by the day looks small until it is multiplied: Fulfillable's £0.80 a pallet a day is £24 for a 30-day month, and DDT's 1.20 zł a pallet a day is 36 zł, about €8.18 at the ECB rate of 4 November 2026, against FulFy's €12.00 a month. ^S6,S4,S13,S3 Packing materials may sit inside the fee or outside it: Venipak includes them in its dispatch allowance ^S2, FulFy charges them on top. ^S3 And a price “from” is the floor of a range, not a quote; PADPACK labels its own figures “Ceny przykładowe” - example prices. ^S5

What packing in-house really costs

Nobody publishes an in-house rate card, so this section is reasoning rather than reporting. The steps are the same as on the 3PL's bill. The difference is how you pay for them: mostly in time, and in space you may already be paying for.

• Labour. Minutes per order times what an hour costs you, employer contributions included. For scale, Eurostat's estimate of the average hourly labour cost in transportation and storage in 2025 was €16.2 in Lithuania, €16.0 in Latvia, €18.1 in Estonia, €17.9 in Poland and €35.8 in Germany. ^S11 That covers wage and non-wage costs ^S12, but it is an average across every kind of transport and warehouse job, drivers included; your own payroll is the better number. If you pack yourself, your hour still has a price. It just never arrives as an invoice.
• Space. Shelving and a packing table somewhere. In a room you already rent, the extra cost can be close to nothing until it runs out; after that it is a bigger lease.
• Materials and equipment. Boxes, mailers, tape and void fill, a label printer, a scanner.
• Software. Something to pull orders from the shop, print labels and keep stock counts right.
• Shipping on your own contracts. Labels go on your own carrier accounts at your rates. How those compare with buying through someone else's account is in aggregator rates or your own carrier contract.
• Mistakes and peaks. Wrong items sent, the extra hands in November, the owner's evenings. Real costs that never appear as a line anywhere.

The one number to measure before any comparison is your own time per order, from picking the first item to sealing the parcel, over a normal week. How to measure it fairly, and how to bring it down, is in how to pack orders faster.

A worked example: what the handling fee buys

The cleanest comparison the published numbers allow is the handling fee - pick plus pack - set against the time that money would buy at home. Here is a shop sending single-item orders in parcels up to 5 kg, at three volumes, on the two itemised lists that price both steps.

Read the minutes as a threshold, and treat it as reasoning rather than a finding. If picking and packing a single-item order takes your team less time than that, all in, your labour costs less than the 3PL's handling fee. If it takes longer, the fee is cheaper than your labour before anything else is counted. Everything else on both bills is left out on purpose: your space, materials and software on one side, the 3PL's storage, receiving, returns and shipping on the other.

Venipak's bundle does not fit the table, because its price covers more than handling. At exactly its included 55 orders, the €200 Mini plan works out at €3.64 an order, and the €500 Midi plan at €3.13 for 160 - with storage, two or five inbound deliveries, returns, packaging material and goods insurance inside that figure. ^S1,S2 At Eurostat's €16.2 an hour for Lithuanian transport and storage, €3.64 is about 13.5 minutes of labour. ^S11 Above the allowance the page lists an “additional unit” price without saying whether a unit is an order or an item, so the cost at higher volumes is a question for Venipak, not a number to compute here. ^S1

What the table cannot show is the rest of the 3PL bill, and that is where totals part company. FulFy's own example - 200 single-item orders, ten cartons and one pallet received, ten shelf places and one pallet place stored, no returns - comes to €429.78 a month before shipping and materials. That is €2.15 an order, against €1.80 for handling alone. ^S3 Your stock profile decides the gap: run their list with your own pallets, shelves and return rate.

Where the answer changes

The per-order fees move in a straight line with volume. What bends the comparison is everything around them.

• Volume, through the fixed fees. A fixed fee spread over few orders is the price. Venipak's €200 Mini plan is €10 an order at 20 orders a month and €3.64 at its full 55 ^S1; FulFy's base fee adds €1.00 an order at 50 orders and €0.17 at 300. ^S3 Fulfillable's £1,000 minimum would be £5.00 an order at 200 orders before any work is done, though the same page also says it imposes no minimum. ^S6 When a page contradicts itself, get the minimum written into the contract.
• What the 3PLs say about fit. Omnipack writes that fulfillment suits shops with “at least approximately 500-1,000 packages per month” ^S8; 3LP that real room to negotiate usually opens above 1,000 orders a month ^S9; byrd's smallest band on its pricing page is “500 - 1,000 shipments/month”. ^S7 Read those as each provider's view of its own customers, not as a rule.
• Items per order. Every item after the first is another pick fee - €0.50 at FulFy, 0.90 zł at DDT. ^S3,S4 At your own table, a second item from the same shelf may add only seconds.
• Size and weight. FulFy's packing fee doubles from €0.90 to €1.80 between the lightest and heaviest band ^S3; Venipak's order allowance covers 5 units and/or 3 kg, with €0.40 per extra kilo on Mini. ^S1
• How long stock sits. Storage is charged on what waits, not on what sells. byrd says it “might increase your storage costs if your Inventory/Sales ratio continues to exceed a certain threshold”. ^S7 Slow sellers cost more at a 3PL than on a shelf you already pay for.
• Returns. Each one is a fee: €3.49 plus €0.49 an item at FulFy, 3.50 zł at DDT, from £2.00 at Fulfillable. ^S3,S4,S6 What the rest of a return costs is in the real cost of returns.

So the answer turns on the shape of your orders as much as their number - reasoning from the price lists, not a finding. Steady volume, one item per order, small parcels, fast-moving stock and few returns is the shape these lists reward. Many items per order, bulky or slow stock and a high return rate is the shape they charge for, line by line, every month.

What you give up when you outsource

Price is the part that fits on a spreadsheet. The rest shows up the first time something goes wrong, or the day you want to leave.

Your carrier contracts

At a 3PL, shipping is normally bought through the 3PL. FulFy's shipping prices depend on destination, weight and carrier and come as a price list on request ^S3; byrd adds a service fee on top of the shipping cost ^S7; Venipak includes “integration with e-commerce platform and couriers” in its plans. ^S1 Pooled rates may beat yours, or not. None of the five price lists says whether a shop can ship on its own carrier contract through that 3PL, so ask. What changes when someone else holds the carrier account is covered in aggregator rates or your own carrier contract.

The packing table

In-house, you decide what goes in the box, how it is wrapped and what happens to an order that looks wrong. At a 3PL those become specifications and line items: byrd lists branding material as an option and charges extra at inbound for serial-number tracking. ^S7 Anything you do by hand today - a note, a sample, gift wrap - has to be written down, priced and checked.

Cut-offs, speed and peaks

Your dispatch time becomes the 3PL's cut-off. Venipak promises delivery to the door or the nearest parcel locker by the next business day ^S1, and DDT states an 18:00 cut-off ^S4; FulFy, PADPACK and Fulfillable publish none. ^S3,S5,S6 A 3PL has more hands than you, but its other clients run Black Friday the same week you do, so ask how it staffs November and December, whether peak orders cost more, and what it promises when volume doubles. None of the five price lists mentions a peak surcharge either way. The weeks to plan for are in the Black Friday fulfillment checklist.

Returns

In-house, a return lands on the desk of someone who knows the product. At a 3PL it is checked against a written standard and charged per item. ^S3,S4,S6 Agree in advance who decides what is resaleable, and how quickly a restocked item shows as available in your shop again.

Your stock

Stock at a 3PL sits under its terms. Venipak includes goods insurance of up to €15,000 in its Mini plan and €50,000 in Midi. ^S1 Where a warehouse works on the German forwarders' standard terms, its liability can be far below the value of the goods: Fiege, a German logistics group, summarises clause 24 of the ADSp 2017 as limiting it to 8.33 special drawing rights per kilo and €35,000 per damage case, and to €70,000 for differences between booked and actual stock. ^S14 Those are German terms that a Baltic or Polish 3PL may not use, which is the point: read the liability clause before the price list.

The warehouse can also hold the stock. German commercial law gives a warehouse keeper a lien on stored goods for its claims under the storage contract ^S15, and Lithuania's national encyclopedia describes the same right for any paid safekeeping: the keeper may withhold the goods until the fee is paid. ^S16 A billing dispute can become a stock dispute. Neither is legal advice for your contract; ask what happens to your stock if you leave or dispute an invoice, and what notice either side must give. None of the five price lists states a notice period.

When a 3PL is the right call

Often enough. The case is real, and it is strongest when:

• Your volume is steady and clears the 3PLs' own floor. Omnipack puts it at roughly 500–1,000 parcels a month ^S8, and the handling fees in the worked example cost less than the minutes you measured.
• Space, not money, is the constraint. A bigger room is a lease and a fit-out. A 3PL's space is billed by the pallet, shelf or cubic metre and grows with you: Venipak's smallest plan starts at 5 m³ ^S1, and FulFy sets no minimum volume. ^S3
• Your time is worth more elsewhere. If the founder packs every evening, the in-house cost on paper is wrong by the value of those evenings.
• Your orders are simple. One or two items, small and light, few returns: the shape the price lists reward. ^S3,S1
• You sell into a market far from your stock. A warehouse in the country you ship to shortens the route. That is reasoning, not a measurement, so price the lane first.

The case weakens with many items per order, bulky or slow-moving stock, frequent returns, and products that need judgement at the table - fragile, personalised, made to order - or that you sell partly on how they arrive.

Hybrid set-ups

It does not have to be all or nothing. These splits follow from the price structure above; they are reasoning, not a survey of what shops do:

• Split by product. Small, fast-selling, single-item lines at the 3PL; bulky, fragile, personalised or made-to-order items at home, where the price lists would charge most for them.
• Split by market. Keep the home market in-house and put stock for a distant market in a warehouse there.
• Split by season. Pack in-house all year and send overflow stock out for the peak. Check minimum terms first: a fixed monthly fee like Venipak's is paid in the quiet months too. ^S1
• Split by how fast stock moves. Slow lines where storage is cheapest, fast lines next to the packing table.

Every split needs the same thing to work: each order routed to the right place without anyone deciding by hand, and stock counted in both places. Without that, the savings go on fixing orders sent from the wrong warehouse.

Questions to ask a 3PL before you sign

1. What exactly is in “per order”? Items included, packing labour, materials, the label. FulFy's packing fee excludes material; Venipak's order allowance includes it. ^S3,S2
2. How is storage measured and billed? Pallet, shelf, bin or cubic metre; per day or per month; and is there a surcharge for slow stock, as byrd describes? ^S7
3. What does receiving cost, and how fast is stock sellable? Per pallet, per carton, or per hour for loose loads. ^S3,S6
4. What is the base fee or monthly minimum, and is it in the contract? ^S6
5. Whose carrier contracts, and what is added to the carrier's price? ^S7
6. What is the daily cut-off, and what changes in November and December?
7. How are returns inspected and charged? ^S3,S4
8. What is the liability per item or per kilo, and is insurance included? ^S1,S14
9. What happens to the stock in a billing dispute, and how much notice ends the contract? ^S15
10. How do orders reach the warehouse? Which integration, who builds it, what it costs. DDT says its integrations with BaseLinker, Allegro, Amazon and others are free; Venipak includes the integration in its plans. ^S4,S1
11. What will you see? Stock levels, order status, and mistakes per thousand orders, in writing, every month.

Then run the worked example with their numbers and your own measured minutes, not with anyone's averages.