Fulfillment in e-commerce — what it is, what it costs and when it pays off

Fulfillment in e-commerce means handing your warehousing, order picking and shipping over to an outside company and paying for it by the number of units handled and the space they take up, rather than a flat subscription that stays the same regardless of volume. It's a way to buy back your own time and floor space, but one that only pays off past a certain scale, and mainly when your parcels have a predictable size mix rather than a random blend of small items and bulky ones. In Poland, outside Allegro, fulfillment is mostly priced by individual quote rather than from a published rate card — this article explains what the service actually covers, which providers disclose how they charge, what One Fulfillment by Allegro costs, and how to work out whether it pays off for you.

What fulfillment is

Fulfillment covers everything from the moment your stock arrives at a provider's warehouse to the point where a customer sends an item back, if they do. Shopify, describing the process as a whole, breaks it into six steps: stock arrives from your suppliers and is quality-checked and stored under an inventory management system; a customer places an order; the order data reaches the person or team responsible for fulfillment; that team picks and packs the order and prints a shipping label; the packed order goes to a carrier; and, if the store runs a returns policy, the customer can send the item back and the team inspects what comes in. This is a platform vendor's own description, not a standard set by any industry body — but the six steps it lists match what every fulfillment provider actually does in practice: receiving, storage, picking and packing, shipping, returns.

Fulfillment differs from plain shipping in that it also covers storage and picking — a company that only generates shipping labels and hands the parcel to a carrier (a carrier-label broker) doesn't run your warehouse and doesn't hold your stock. That distinction matters when you're choosing a provider: some companies that market themselves as "e-commerce logistics" are, in practice, label brokers, not fulfillment in the sense described above.

It's also worth telling fulfillment apart from a concept it often gets confused with — dropshipping. In dropshipping, the goods never reach your warehouse, or a warehouse run on your behalf — you sell a product you never physically hold, and a supplier (often overseas) ships it straight to the customer. In fulfillment, you still own the stock while it's sitting in the provider's warehouse — the difference is about who owns the inventory the moment an order is placed, not just about who physically packs the parcel.

Fulfillment providers in Poland

In Poland, outside Allegro, fulfillment is priced by individual quote. Only one provider in this review has a complete public fee table in złoty (PLN), and the rest quote after a conversation about your business — which is consistent with how the market works generally: fulfillment cost depends on too many variables at once — unit size, stock turnover, return rate, packaging requirements — to summarise in a single table. In practice, that means before you compare providers, you need your own numbers ready: monthly order volume, your parcel size mix, your return rate — without them, every sales conversation starts from zero.

• One Fulfillment by Allegro — the only provider in the review with a complete public fee table in PLN (help.allegro.com); the full table is in the next section.
• InPost Fulfillment — real-time store integration, warehousing, packing to your guidelines, shipping (preferential InPost Paczkomat and courier rates, other carriers too) and returns. No public price list, only a form: "if your company ships at least 1,000 orders a month, fill in the form", and an account manager prepares an offer (inpost.pl/fulfillment).
• Omnipack — explicitly does not publish a price list (it has to "get to know your business" first); billing is proportional to the space actually used and the orders fulfilled. The target volume is 500+ parcels a month, with full benefits at "at least approx. 500–1,000 parcels a month", and onboarding may take 2–4 weeks (omnipack.com/pl/cennik).

Amazon FBA (Amazon.pl) publishes its rates, but in several pieces (sell.amazon.pl/oplaty, read 2026-10-05). The Individual selling plan costs PLN 4 net per unit sold, the Professional plan PLN 165.91 net per month. The fulfilment fee is a flat fee per product, depending on product type, dimensions and weight, with detailed tables in separate documents. Storage on the Polish page is quoted in euros per cubic metre per month and is higher from October to December: for standard-size non-apparel items EUR 27.54 from January to September and EUR 52.20 from October to December. From 17 April 2026 Amazon applies a 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge to FBA fulfilment fees. Run your own numbers through Amazon's Revenue Calculator (sell.amazon.pl/oplaty#calculator), which includes the surcharge.

If you're comparing fulfillment to selling through a marketplace instead, keep the two decisions separate: a marketplace gives you a sales channel, not a warehouse. Listing on one doesn't mean it stores or ships your stock for you, unless it explicitly sells that as a separate service, the way Amazon does with FBA.

One name worth a caution, in case it turns up in your own research: [Cubyn](https://www.cubyn.com/), an e-commerce fulfillment provider, has shut down — its site opens with a permanent-closure notice ("Cubyn has permanently closed its doors"), and its old pricing page is stale (euro rates, a 2022 footer). Don't count it as an option, and check that any fulfillment provider's own site carries a recent-enough date before you rely on it.

A distinction worth keeping in mind while you shortlist providers: carrier-label platforms and courier brokers — in Poland, for example, Furgonetka and Apaczka, useful for buying postage at negotiated rates and integrated with stores — don't run warehouses; storage is not listed as a service on their home pages. You still pick, pack and store the order yourself; the platform only generates the label and hands the parcel to a carrier. That's a shipping tool, not fulfillment in the sense this article uses the word.

What fulfillment costs

The cost structure is consistent across providers, and it's worth understanding before you ask for a quote. Expect four components in any quote you receive: a per-unit handling fee that usually scales with the size or weight class of the item; a storage fee, sometimes free for a short initial window and then increasing the longer stock sits unmoved; a returns-handling fee, charged separately from the outbound handling fee; and the cost of shipping the parcel to the end customer, which most providers bill on top of everything else, though some (Amazon FBA among them) fold it into the per-unit fee.

The one public price list in Poland is that of One Fulfillment by Allegro (all amounts net, read 2026-10-05; the page gives no "effective from" date; help.allegro.com).

Base fee per unit by size class (maximum volume): A (0.3 l) PLN 2.69; B (1 l) PLN 4.29; C (3 l) PLN 5.49; D (15 l) PLN 7.49; E (31 l) PLN 8.49; F (76.8 l) PLN 11.49; G1 (179.4 l, own packaging) PLN 17.99; G2 (179.4 l, Allegro packaging) PLN 24.49. It covers inbound, picking and packing, packaging and fillers, and buyer queries about fulfilment, and is charged when the unit ships.

Extra fees: return PLN 1.99 per sellable unit, PLN 3.99 per non-sellable; removal PLN 1.19 per unit plus transport; disposal PLN 1.99 per kg; labelling unlabelled cartons or pallets PLN 0.30 per label; transfer between accounts or offers PLN 1.59 per unit; inbound discrepancies PLN 0.19–0.99 per unit; container delivery PLN 500 (up to 20 ft) or PLN 1,000 (longer), the first container per account free. Delivery to the buyer is billed separately under the general Allegro rules, and transport to the warehouse is paid by the seller.

Storage, per cubic metre per day: days 1–30 free; 31–60 PLN 1.49; 61–90 PLN 2.49; 91–120 PLN 6.49; 121–150 PLN 14.99; 151–180 PLN 19.99; 181–360 PLN 29.99; over 360 days PLN 49.99. Storage stops when the unit ships to the buyer.

Who can use it. An active VAT payer registered in Poland, with a Polish VAT number on the white list of VAT payers (biała lista podatników VAT) and a company address matching the white list, checked before start and daily; there is no volume threshold. The warehouses are Allegro A2 in Warsaw Park, Adamów (Panattoni Park Grodzisk IV) and Dąbrówka Wielka near Zgierz, run for Allegro by Arvato. Allegro sets the size class at the first inbound from the three longest dimensions; the maximum product is 65 × 60 × 46 cm. Allegro's own example: a 23 × 8.4 × 20.1 cm product is 0.00388 m³ (about 3.9 l), more than class C's 3 l, so it falls into class D — PLN 7.49 instead of PLN 5.49, PLN 2.00 more per shipment. Allegro also provides a cost calculator (category, product volume, forecast sales).

To see how that adds up (our own example, assumed variables): at 500 units a month in class A, handling alone is 500 × PLN 2.69 = PLN 1,345 net a month, before storage, extras and delivery. If every one of those units leaves the warehouse within 30 days, storage adds nothing to that total; stock that sits for months starts costing extra, in tiers, until the fee becomes steep enough to force a decision — sell it off or pull it out. That's the mechanism every quote you get will follow — only the numbers, and the width of the free window, change by provider and by your product's size class.

When fulfillment pays off

The mechanism that decides whether it's worth it is simpler than any price list: fulfillment trades your time and your floor space for a fee charged per unit and per cubic metre. It pays off when the time your team spends picking and packing has a higher opportunity cost than that fee — in other words, when that time could go into sales, customer service or expanding your range instead of taping up boxes. It also pays off when your sales are seasonally uneven: fulfillment means you don't have to rent (and pay for, all year round) warehouse space sized for your peak season, because you pay for the cubic metres you actually use in a given month, not for a hall rented up front.

The second variable is how predictable your parcel sizes are. A fee structure built around size classes rewards a catalogue with repeatable dimensions — if you sell one type of product in a few variants of the same size, the per-unit cost is easy to forecast. If your range mixes small accessories with bulky items, every unit lands in a different fee class, which makes it harder to forecast cost per order.

The third variable is your return rate. Fulfillment doesn't remove the cost of handling a return — it shifts it onto a separate per-unit returns fee, listed apart from the rest. If your category has a high return rate (clothing or footwear, for example), that cost needs to carry the same weight in your break-even math as the handling fee, not sit as a marginal add-on.

The fourth variable, easy to miss on a first pass, is the opportunity cost of your own space. If you're currently storing stock in a room you could use differently — an office, a space for product photography, room for more range — the cost of fulfillment needs to be weighed not just against warehouse rent, but against what you gain by freeing that space up. That's usually harder to put a number on than the per-unit rate, but in small premises it can be the deciding factor.

Integrating fulfillment with your store

Fulfillment doesn't work in isolation from the rest of your systems — for the provider to know what to ship and when, they need your orders in real time, or close to it, and you need to know their current stock level before your store starts accepting orders for something that physically isn't there any more. In practice, that's the same data-architecture problem that comes up with supplier-feed integration and ERP/WMS/CRM integration: you need one source of truth for stock levels, even when the physical warehouse sits outside your own four walls. If a marketplace is your main sales channel, its own fulfillment programme, where one exists, integrates within that same platform, which removes one synchronisation step; for every other channel — your own store, other marketplaces — the integration runs through the provider's API or through an ERP that syncs stock across every channel at once.

If you're trying to work out how fulfillment changes your total cost of running a store — not just the handling fee, but what you stop paying for your own warehouse and warehouse staff once you hand it off — run the numbers through the e-commerce TCO calculator. It breaks the cost down into line items you can compare against "keep the warehouse in-house", instead of looking only at the per-unit rate.

The practical rollout order is usually: agree the data-exchange format for orders and stock levels with the provider first (file, API, webhook), then test it on a limited slice of your catalogue — one product category with a repeatable size, say — before moving the whole range over. That cuts the risk of moving your entire catalogue into a new warehouse while the stock-level integration still isn't working properly, which in practice means either overselling stock that physically isn't there, or blocking sales too early on stock that's already arrived.

Fulfillment vs. running your own warehouse

Neither option is universally better — the table shows which variables tip the balance one way or the other, depending on your volume, your seasonality, and how much control over the packaging itself matters to you.

Questions to ask a provider before you sign

Before you sign with a fulfillment provider, get written answers to these questions rather than verbal assurances on a sales call:

• What does the full fee schedule look like — the base per-unit fee, storage, returns, stock removal, disposal — and does the provider guarantee it for a set period, or can it change at any time?
• What's the minimum order volume or contract value below which the service isn't available, or stops making financial sense?
• How does it integrate with your store and your other sales channels — API, how often stock levels sync, what happens when the two sides drift out of sync?
• How does the provider handle returns — do they go back onto available stock automatically, or do they need manual review, and what does that cost per unit?
• What's the time from receiving an order to shipping it (SLA), and what happens when that time slips during peak season?
• How does the provider measure your products and assign their size class, and can you dispute the class it assigns?
• What are the termination terms, and how long does it take to get your stock back out of the provider's warehouse if you decide to change models?