The Best Fulfilment Companies for Small Businesses

Fedex is the best company for small business fulfilment, followed by Bezos.ai. If you need more options, we’re more than happy to share our free quote requesting tool so you can save time – and money.

As your business grows, it’s time to start outsourcing your ecommerce fulfilment responsibilities. If you’re shipping more than a dozen items a day, you should hire a company to handle the picking, packaging, and postage of your sold stock. You’ll cut costs, streamline your operation, and scale up faster.

We’ve researched the best companies for small business fulfilment in terms of scalability, price, late orders, handling returns and even more.

Is order fulfilment the right choice for you? If your budget is on the small side, you’ve been trading for less than six months or you’re selling low-cost goods, you may be better off looking into other options, such as using software to fulfil order yourself, or dropshipping.

But if you’ve got the ambition to scale up your orders and bring your budget to bear, read on for our small business fulfilment guide.

The best small business fulfilment (3PL) companies

If you’re short on time, here’s a quick comparison of the best order fulfilment services:

We compared the range of ecommerce fulfilment services in the UK to find the ones best suited to the needs of small businesses. In particular, we kept an eye out for low fees, straightforward pricing, and a focus on catering to the needs of smaller scale operations. And here’s what we came up with.

The best small business fulfilment companies in the UK are FedEx, Bezos.ai, Huboo, Core Fulfilment, Abstrakt, James and James, and Amazon FBA.

FedEx

Best for online stock and order management

FedEx pricing

FedEx offers pricing that’s tailored to the unique product, storage, and packaging demands of your business. You’ll need to get in touch with FedEx directly for a better idea of what your fees will be. 

Alternatively, if you’re ready to invest in full ecommerce fulfilment services you can get a range of tailored quotes from hand-picked suppliers now.

It’s no obligation at all – just answer a couple of questions about your delivery needs. 

In return, you’ll receive quotes from the best ecommerce fulfilment suppliers in your area. You’ll save time and take the guesswork out of price comparison.

Bezos

Best for eco friendly order fulfilment and delivery

Bezos pricing

Bezos keeps its pricing under wraps, stating only that there’s a monthly subscription fee and a charge per order.

Huboo

Best for low-volume order fulfilment

Huboo pricing (exclusive of VAT)

Here are the account management fees you’ll pay each month:

• Silver (300 dispatches per month) £50
• Gold (1,500 dispatches per month) £150
• Platinum (5,000 dispatches per month) £450

Storage fees per month (per item):

• Large letter: 6p
• Small packet 17p
• Small parcel: 46p
• Medium-extra large parcel: £1.15

Packaging costs for jiffy bags and envelopes (per item):

• Large letter: 35p
• Small packets: 46p
• Small parcels: 58p
• Medium parcel: £1.04
• Large parcel: £2.24
• Extra large parcel: £3.39

Fulfilment (picking and postage) fees:

Huboo’s standard rates for individual items start from £1.36 (a small letter – up to 20g – processed within 48 hours) and go up to £6.20 (a medium parcel – up to 2kg – processed within 24 hours). These fees include receiving, picking, packing, and postage/courier costs.

This is a partially tracked service, meaning a third-party company collects your package from Huboo and delivers it to a courier such as DPD, Royal Mail or Evri (formerly known as Hermes). At this stage, you’ll receive a notification that it’s been dispatched, and is on its way to your customer. It’s a cheaper service but comes with clear logistical limitations, and is slower than Huboo’s other options.

Here’s where Huboo’s fully end-to-end tracking service comes in. Rates for this start from £4.78 (for a small parcel – up to 500g – processed within 48 hours), and go up to £9.56 (for an extra-large parcel – up to 20kg – processed within 24 hours).

For corporate rates of over 5,000 units per month, answer a couple of questions and we’ll ask Huboo to get in touch with you.

Core Fulfilment

Best for late order cut-offs

Core Fulfilment pricing

Core Fulfilment’s picking and packing fees start at £1.95 per single order with one item in it. It’s 25p extra for each additional item added to the same order.

Storage fees weigh in at £10.88 per pallet (approximately one m³), when you have up to 50 unique products (SKUs, or stock-keeping units) in your inventory. As you add more unique SKUs, storage fees will increase accordingly.

Abstrakt

Best for returns handling

Abstrakt pricing

Abstrakt doesn’t advertise its rates on its website. All of Abstrakt’s pricing is bespoke, so you’ll need to get in touch with the supplier directly, and provide some information about your business.

Remember, though, you can also trust us to provide you 3PL quotes tailor-made for your small business. Just jot down some brief details about where and how you currently sell online and we’ll contact the providers on your behalf. 

James and James

Best for startups and micro-businesses needing ecommerce fulfilment

James and James pricing

James and James is also coy when it comes to disclosing exact ecommerce fulfilment rates. What it’s website does tell us, though, is that you’ll pay three different types of fees:

• Fulfilment services costs: These include dedicated customer support, integration with your shopping cart, and your order fulfilment software licence fees
• Fulfilment centre costs: These are what you’ll pay for the receipt and storage of your stock at James and James’ fulfilment centres (warehouses)
• Order fulfilment costs: These fees are for the picking, packing, packaging, and shipping of your stock, and include a returns handling service

Amazon FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon)

Best for selling small-sized, low value goods at high volume

Oh, and those faults we were talking about? Well, Amazon FBA hikes its prices during the leadup to Christmas. It’s also widely known that Amazon co-mingles stock, meaning the product your customer ordered may not be the one they actually receive.

Amazon FBA pricing

Amazon FBA offers two pricing plans. There’s the ‘Basic’ plan, for sellers shifting fewer than 35 items per month, and ‘Professional’ – for everyone else.

With the ‘Basic’ plan, you won’t pay a subscription fee. Sounds good, right? Well, let’s dig a little deeper. Firstly, you will pay a ‘selling’ fee of 75p on every item you sell – plus ‘additional fees’. Huh?

Looking into the latter a little more closely, they’re what Amazon dubs ‘referral fees’. This is an extra charge calculated against the total sales price of your item, and includes the cost of any delivery or gift wrapping, too. It’ll depend on the category of the items you’re selling, and is typically a minimum of 25 per item.

Percentage-wise, these ‘additional’ fees (or ‘referral’ fees, if you like that better) can be as low as 7.14% of your item’s sale price (clothing, computers, cars/motorbikes, consumer electronics, large appliances, and tyres), and as high as 45.9% (Amazon device accessories).

Not sounding quite so cheap any more, is it?

The alternative is Amazon’s ‘Professional’ plan. With this, you’ll pay a monthly subscription fee of £25 per month (plus VAT). You won’t be charged the 75p per item ‘selling’ fee of Amazon’s pay-as-you go plan here. However, you will still be eligible for those pesky ‘additional fees’.

Don’t let guesswork define your small business’s approach to ecommerce fulfilment. Find out exactly what you can expect to pay with FBA’s ‘additional fees’, or… simply go with another provider!

Finding an order fulfilment provider for your small business: next steps

If your business is pre-trading, shipping very low volumes of products (fewer than 10 a day), or running on a tight budget, order fulfilment may not be the best option for you at this point. But if you check all those boxes…

Which ecommerce fulfilment provider you ultimately choose for your small business should depend on several factors. 

The first is down to which kind of features you’re looking to prioritise. If it’s total visibility and control over your inventory and order management – with excellent reporting features to match – then FedEx is your best bet. If low fees are at the top of your wishlist, though, don’t look past Huboo.

As a young, growing business, you’ll also need to think about how to best optimise your customers’ experience. To do this, we’d recommend both Abstrakt (for making the returns process as seamless as it can be), and Core Fulfilment (for offering your customers late cut-offs for next-day delivery).

Finally, you’ll need to take into consideration the size and specific needs of your ecommerce business. If you’ve literally just started out, James and James is the best option for you. Likewise, if you’re building your reputation selling low value goods at high volume, Amazon FBA is a good place to start.

Don’t just take our word for it, though – find out for yourself which ecommerce fulfilment service is the most well-suited to your small business. It takes 30 seconds, and it’s your shortcut to getting the best deal. 

Simply select the answers to a few short, straightforward questions about your current situation. Things like:

• How long you’ve been trading for
• How you currently deliver your products
• Where you sell your stock
• The number of parcels you deliver daily
• The rough size of an average parcel you’d deal in

Then we’ll provide you with quotes tailored to the responses you gave, ensuring you get an ecommerce fulfilment solution that’s unique.