Inventory & Logistics

I want to sell more without turning my spare room into a warehouse.

Selling online has a second half nobody puts in the tutorial: somebody has to find the thing, box it, label it, post it, and sort it out when it comes back. At ten orders a week that's you at the kitchen table, and it's actually rather fun. At a hundred, it's a spare room you can no longer access because it's full of parcels. And if you're launching something new — a brand, a product line, a range for your audience — you may well be wondering how to do it without renting a warehouse, hiring a team, and learning logistics the hard way.

There's a third option between "do it all yourself" and "build your own warehouse": hand the storing, packing and posting to a specialist. Finding the right one is a lot less obvious than it looks, so we'll help you with that — we've done logistics work for much larger businesses, and we know which questions to ask.

Sound familiar?

• You're about to launch and want someone else to handle the boxes — but you've no idea who, or what's reasonable to pay.
• You've looked at fulfilment companies, got three quotes in three different formats, and closed the tab.
• Your stock lives in a spreadsheet, and the number on the website is a different number.
• You've sold something you didn't have, at least once, and had to write the apologetic email.
• You couldn't say, hand on heart, what it costs you to pick, pack and post a single order.
• Your spare room, garage or back office has quietly become a stockroom.

What's usually going on

• Quotes that can't be compared. Fulfilment providers price in different ways — storage, picking, packing, receiving, returns, minimum fees — and a cheap headline rate can turn out dear once everything's in. It's not you; it's the way they're written. We will help you cut through to find what's cheaper for your projected use case.
• Nobody's sure what an order costs. Between packaging, postage, storage and your own time, the true figure is usually higher than expected and, more importantly, usually a figure nobody's worked out. Hard to know if you're making money on a product when you can't say what it costs to get it to the customer.
• Stock lives in too many places. One count on the shelf, one in a spreadsheet, one on the site, one on the marketplace. They agree on Monday and have drifted apart by Wednesday. We'll make sure everything is connected so you know what the actual situation is.

How we'd tackle it

1. Work out what you actually need. What you sell, how big it is, how many orders you expect, how often it comes back, how lumpy the year is (hello, Christmas) — and what an order costs you today, all in. It's frequently the most useful hour of the whole project.
2. Shortlist and compare. We find providers that suit your kind of product, put their quotes side by side on a like-for-like basis, and ask the awkward questions up front: onboarding, minimums, returns, integration with your shop, what happens when it goes wrong.
3. Plan the handover. Connect the provider to your store, test with real orders, and set up one source of truth for stock so what the site says is on the shelf is on the shelf.

Where we'd start

If you're launching or growing and want to outsource the warehouse side, we'll start with a fulfilment partner search. If you're already shipping and just want to know where the money's going, we'll start with a cost-per-order check. If you want it to "just happen", we'll line up potential partners, grill them to find the best deal, connect it up to your site and get everything clear from fulfilment to reporting.

The honest bit

Not everyone needs a 3PL. At low volumes, doing it yourself can be cheaper, and we'll say so. Sometimes the answer to "how do I sell more?" turns out to be "not yet — your numbers don't work", and often the cheapest win is simply a smaller box. If we ever have a commercial relationship with a provider we recommend, we'll tell you before you sign anything.

Tell us what you sell and how it gets to people. Get in touch

Related challenges: AI & Automation · Modernisation