China fulfillment costs explained (2026)

Ask three fulfillment providers "what will an order cost me?" and you will get three quotes that are impossible to compare, one hides storage, one buries pick fees in "handling", one quotes shipping pre-tax. This guide breaks a China-fulfilled order into the six lines it always reduces to, shows the real math on a $15.15 example order, and points at the three places merchants routinely overpay.

The 6 cost lines

Every order fulfilled from China, ours or anyone else's, is a sum of six things. If a quote doesn't map cleanly onto these, something is hidden in it.

1. 1Product cost. What the unit costs at the factory or on 1688, the biggest line and the one your sourcing quality controls.
2. 2Inbound freight. Getting cartons from the supplier to the warehouse. From nearby factories this is often $3-8 per carton, pennies per unit once amortized.
3. 3Pick & pack. Pulling the item, scanning it, boxing it. We charge $1.20 for the first item and $0.35 per additional item in the same order.
4. 4Last-mile shipping. The tracked line to your customer, priced by packed weight, dimensions and destination. EU standard starts at $4.20 for a 100 g parcel and $5.60 at 250 g, IOSS-inclusive.
5. 5Storage. Shelf space per unit. First 7 days free for every batch, then $0.02 per unit per month, tiny per order if stock turns, real money if it doesn't.
6. 6Supplemental services. Optional extras: branded inserts, bundling, extra QC photos, fragile wrap. Zero unless you ask for them.

Here is how those lines land on a worked example, a marble trinket tray (SKU SKU-TRAY-MARB-S, packed weight 240 g) shipped standard to a customer in Germany:

Selling that tray at $34.90 leaves $19.75 before payment processing and ad spend, a 57% post-fulfillment margin. The point of splitting the six lines is that each one responds to a different lever: better sourcing moves line 1, batching orders moves line 3, packaging moves line 4.

What storage really costs

Storage is the line merchants either ignore or panic about, and both are wrong. Storage is billed per occupied slot, not per unit: $2 a month for a bin, $5 for a shelf and $20 for a pallet, with the first week free. A carton of 72 trays on one shelf slot is $5 a month. Turn it in six weeks and each unit sold carries about seven cents of storage.

The math flips on stock that doesn't move. A pallet of slow movers accrues $0.67 a day, $20 a month, $60 a quarter, while earning nothing. That is why our inventory page shows the accrued storage charge per SKU: the number tells you exactly which SKUs to discount, bundle or dispose of before the fee outgrows the margin.

Where merchants overpay

The overpayment patterns we see at our China fulfillment center are boringly consistent. Three mistakes cover most of the wasted money:

1. 1Shipping air. Oversized retail boxes trigger dimensional-weight pricing. A candle in a 15 × 15 × 15 cm gift box bills as ~560 g even at 300 g actual, that's $1.60-2.20 extra on every EU parcel. Ship the product in a fitted mailer and add the gift box flat-packed.
2. 2Letting slow movers squat. "It's only two cents a unit" is how a forgotten pallet of a thousand units quietly costs $60 a quarter. Review your storage line monthly; anything accruing more than 5% of its margin should be discounted or pulled.
3. 3Defaulting to expedited. Expedited lines cost $3-5 more per parcel to arrive 3-4 days sooner. On a $25 order that's 12-20% of revenue for a difference most customers never asked for. Reserve expedited for reshipments and high-AOV orders.

A worked example

Putting all six lines together for a month of real volume:

Takeaways

• Every quote reduces to six lines: product, inbound freight, pick & pack, shipping, storage, supplemental. Force any provider's pricing into that shape before comparing.
• Storage is cents per order on turning stock and real money on dead stock, watch the per-SKU accrual, not the headline rate.
• Packaging is a shipping decision: fitted mailers beat oversized gift boxes by $1.60-2.20 per EU parcel.
• Expedited shipping is a tool, not a default, it belongs on reshipments and high-AOV orders only.
• A typical light home-goods order lands in the EU for $8-14 all-in, run your own SKUs through the shipping calculator to get exact figures.