ShipBob pricing: quote-only, and how to make quotes comparable

What ShipBob publishes, and what it does not

Read ShipBob's own pricing page and you will find structure rather than numbers. The standard fees it names are implementation, receiving your inventory, warehousing your products, and picking, packing and shipping each order. Beyond those, kitting and other customisations, returns management as a flat fee, and B2B, wholesale or EDI orders all carry additional cost. Shipping itself is described as variable by weight, dimensions, destination and service.

Two things genuinely are included and are worth crediting: the software platform is free for all customers, and standard packaging — plain boxes, poly mailers, tape and labels — is provided at no charge. In a category where WMS access is often a line item, that is a real inclusion.

The absence of published rates is a finding, not a scandal, and it is close to universal among 3PLs. Fulfilment cost really does depend on your products, your order profile and where your customers live, and a rate card that ignored all three would be worse than no rate card. It does have one consequence you have to plan around: you cannot shop for a 3PL by reading pages. You have to run a quote process, and you have to run it carefully, because two quotes are not comparable until you make them so.

We are not going to put a calculator on this page. Every figure in it would be one we made up, and a made-up number rendered in a nice interface is still a made-up number.

The five lines that make up any 3PL bill

Whatever the vendor calls them, these are the components. Understanding what moves each one is the whole skill of buying fulfilment well.

• Implementation or onboarding. One-off. Covers integration setup, SKU creation and account configuration. Ask whether it is waived at volume and whether it recurs if you add a channel later.
• Receiving. Charged when your inbound shipment arrives — often per unit, per carton or per hour depending on how palletised and labelled the shipment is. This line rewards preparation: correctly labelled, palletised, ASN'd inbounds are cheaper to receive everywhere.
• Storage. Per bin, per shelf or per pallet, per month. The trap is not the rate, it is how a unit gets assigned to a storage type. The same SKU can be a bin at one provider and a shelf at another, and that single definition can move your storage bill more than the headline rate does.
• Pick and pack. Usually a base per order plus a charge per additional item. Your average items-per-order therefore matters as much as your order count, and a brand selling three-packs has a completely different economics profile from one selling singles.
• Shipping. The largest line for most brands, and driven by billable weight, service level and how many zones the parcel crosses. This is the line that node placement is supposed to reduce.

Then the extras: returns handling, kitting and assembly, B2B and EDI with retailer compliance, custom packaging, and account minimums. Ask for every one of them in the same document.

Dimensional weight is where quotes stop being comparable

Carriers bill on billable weight, which is the greater of actual weight and dimensional weight. Dimensional weight is calculated from the parcel's outer dimensions divided by a carrier or contract divisor. Two consequences follow, and they explain most of the gap between a quote and the first real invoice.

First, the box decides the bill on light bulky products. A pillow, a bulky-but-light homeware item, anything in a rigid carton with air in it — those ship on dimensions, not weight. A 3PL that cartonises tightly and one that defaults to a bigger box will quote similarly and invoice very differently.

Second, measurement and rounding policy varies. Ask directly how each provider measures a parcel, how it rounds, and what divisor it uses under its carrier contracts. Ask for the answer in writing. Nobody minds the question, and the ones who answer crisply are usually the ones who have thought about it.

The same physics governs your Amazon inventory, which is why this is worth caring about even if you never leave FBA. Amazon assigns each ASIN a size tier from its recorded dimensions, and the fulfilment fee follows the tier. When the recorded dimensions are wrong — a remeasurement that never got corrected, a packaging change that was never resubmitted — you pay the wrong fee on every unit, invisibly, for as long as nobody checks. Dimensional-weight and size-tier misclassification is the most checkable money on the whole inventory side, and almost nobody checks it because it requires physically measuring products and reconciling them against Amazon's record.

How to get two quotes onto the same basis

The mistake is asking for rate cards and comparing them. Rates are not comparable across providers because the definitions underneath them differ. Ask for a modelled monthly total on your own data instead, and give every provider the identical pack:

• A SKU list with true measured dimensions and weights — measured by you, in the packaging that actually ships, not the values in your spreadsheet from 2023.
• Ninety days of real order history, including ship-to postcodes and items per order.
• Your seasonality, honestly — the Q4 peak and the February trough, not the annual average.
• Your returns rate and what happens to a returned unit: restock, refurbish, or write off.
• Your inbound profile — container, LTL or parcel, palletised or floor-loaded, labelled or not.

Then ask each provider for one number: modelled total cost per month for that exact dataset, with the assumptions listed. Also ask what happens when reality differs from the model, whether there is a minimum, what the support tier is at your volume, and what offboarding costs if you leave. Get the whole thing in one document.

Do that and you have a real comparison. Skip it and you have two PDFs that cannot be added up.

The comparison people get wrong: 3PL versus FBA

A 3PL quote is often held up against the FBA fee and declared cheaper. That comparison is missing several terms. On the FBA side you are also buying the Prime badge and the conversion rate that comes with it, plus Amazon's returns handling and customer service. On the 3PL side you are paying the postage yourself, which the FBA fee had absorbed. For most Amazon-first brands the right answer is not either-or: FBA for Amazon, a 3PL for everything else, with a buffer outside Amazon so a restock limit or a delayed inbound does not take you out of stock.

And here is the part that matters for this page. Choosing a 3PL does not touch your Amazon-side inventory costs at all. The FBA pool still accrues monthly storage fees. The aged-inventory surcharge still starts biting at 181 days of storage, assessed against a monthly inventory snapshot. The low-inventory-level fee still applies when cover falls too low, and the storage utilisation surcharge still applies when stock outruns sales velocity. Shipments still occasionally reconcile short, and the claim windows are tight — current policy describes most fulfilment-centre claims as filed within 60 days, with reimbursements for lost and damaged units valued at your sourcing cost rather than sale price since March 2025.

Where Dr. Stock fits, and where it does not

Plainly: we are not a 3PL and not a ShipBob alternative. We hold no inventory, run no warehouses and ship no orders. If you need a fulfilment network, get quotes from ShipBob and its peers using the process above.

Dr. Stock is the other half — the Amazon-side economics that no fulfilment contract reaches. Reorder timing and stockout risk. Cash trapped in slow-moving SKUs. Storage fees, aged-inventory surcharges, and the removal-versus-liquidation decision made before the threshold rather than after. FBA fee errors and dimensional-weight misclassification, checked by measuring the product and reconciling against Amazon's record. Shipment discrepancies, lost and damaged units, and reimbursement recovery filed inside the windows. The true cost of returns per SKU.

It is Fable 5 doing that work, supervised by operators from Full Circle, a full-service Amazon management company with $500M+ in managed revenue across 100+ brands. You pick the autonomy level — full human approval, supervised, or fully autonomous inside agreed guardrails — and inventory purchasing decisions always come to a human. Orbit is included at no additional cost: inventory, finance and ASIN profitability, plus the BSR, buy box, price and fee trackers. Like ShipBob, we do not publish a price — a demo, the first 30 days free, and a number agreed on the call. We would rather say that than print a figure we would immediately have to qualify.