What it costs depends on what your orders actually are
Anyone can put a price per unit on a website. It will be right for one kind of brand and wrong for everybody else. Here is what actually moves the number.
Or call 01934 912001.
Why there is no single rate
A price per unit describes one job, not the work
Published rates almost always describe the simplest possible order: one item, standard prep, straight into a bag. That is a real job and a perfectly good one. It is also nothing like a hand-finished premium order or a hamper built from twenty lines.
So a headline rate does one of two things. It looks impossibly cheap to a brand whose orders take ten minutes each, which tells them the price is not for them. Or it looks expensive to a brand shipping one packet in a mailing bag, and they leave without asking. Either way the number has filtered out most of the people reading it.
We would rather tell you what drives the cost, let you recognise your own operation in it, and then give you a number that is actually yours.
The four shapes
Find the one that sounds like your orders
One product, batch picked
You sell a packet. A hundred orders come in for it. We pull all hundred in one movement, then pack them in a run. Barely any travel, a fast bench, and the cost per order sits at the bottom of any range you will ever be quoted.
Premium, hand-finished
Printed tissue cut to the carton, folded around the product rather than stuffed in, secured with a branded label, a card placed on top. The picking is trivial. The packing is where the time goes, and it is the reason your customer photographs the box.
Hampers and gifting
Multiple lines pulled from a wide range, laid to a set format so every hamper looks the same, straw padding worked in to fill the gaps and hold it steady. One order can touch fifteen locations and take longer than fifty of the first kind.
Wide range, multi-line orders
A hundred SKUs and orders that rarely contain the same combination twice. Here the pick path is the job: where each line lives, in what sequence it is collected, and how the checks stop two similar items being confused.
Those four cannot share a price. They barely share a process. What they do share is that all of them run here, off one stock record, in one warehouse.
What moves the number
Five things, and none of them is a mystery
- How an order is picked. One line or fifteen, and whether the same combination comes up again.
- How it is packed. Bag and go, or tissue, card, ribbon and a laid format.
- What it needs before it ships. Labelling, bundling, a kitting step, batch or expiry capture.
- How much space it occupies, and when. November is not February, and committed space does not flex.
- What leaves and how. Parcel, pallet, which carrier, and what time it has to be ready.
Tell us those and the number follows quickly. Guess at them and you get a rate that neither of us can stand behind.
Getting a number
Bring your orders, not a category
A thirty minute video call. Useful things to have to hand: roughly how many orders a month, how many SKUs, what a typical order contains, what the customer opens, and anything that has to happen to the goods before they ship. If you do not know some of it yet, that is fine and it is often the more interesting conversation.
You will get how we would run it, what it would cost, and if it is not a fit, that too.
Why not just publish a price list?
Because it would be accurate for one kind of brand and misleading for the rest. A rate built around single-item orders says nothing useful to a gifting brand, and a rate that covers hand-finishing looks expensive to someone shipping one packet.
Is a quote going to take weeks?
No. Most of what is needed comes out in the call itself. The slow part is usually a brand working out what its own packing spec should be, which is worth doing properly.
Do I need my volumes to be exact?
No, and if you are pre-launch you will not have them. The shape of the work matters more than the precise count.
Will the price change as I grow?
The work changes as you grow – more lines, different packing, a different despatch profile – so it is reviewed against what is actually happening rather than left to drift.
Get a number built around your orders
Thirty minutes, with someone who works in the warehouse. Describe how your orders are picked and packed and you will get a straight answer on cost, and on whether we are the right fit at all.
Or call 01934 912001.