If you ship somewhere between 50 and 150 orders a month and every fulfillment quote you have opened mentions a monthly minimum, this is written for you. By the end you will know what a 3PL monthly minimum actually charges you for, how to calculate the order volume that clears one, and whether you should be calling us this year or waiting.
Ours is $500 a month, invoiced. If your charges come in under $500, we bill the difference. We tell you that before you sign, every time, and it sits at the top of our pricing breakdown rather than in an appendix.
A minimum is not one thing, and the difference matters
Three different charges get called a minimum, and they behave nothing alike. Before you compare two providers, work out which one you are looking at.
| What it is called | What it actually gates | What happens if you fall short |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice minimum | The total on your monthly bill | You are billed the difference up to the floor |
| Order volume minimum | The number of orders you ship | The account is refused at signup, or offboarded later |
| Storage or space commitment | Pallet or rack positions reserved for you | You pay for positions sitting empty |
Ours is the first kind. There is no order-count gate to get in the door, and we do not reserve space you are not using. Storage is charged on the positions your inventory actually occupies, so a slow quarter shrinks that line instead of freezing it.
The third kind is the one to read carefully in any contract. A committed space minimum is not automatically unfair, since dock and rack space has to be held for you, but it should be written down, quantified, and renegotiable when your volume changes. If a provider will not put the number in the proposal, that tells you something before you sign anything.
Why any 3PL has a floor, including us
A fulfillment account is not free to carry, even in a month when almost nothing ships. The cost sits in labor and space, and in Southern California both are expensive.
California’s statewide minimum wage rose to $16.90 an hour on January 1, 2026, per the state Labor Commissioner’s Office. That is the legal floor, not the market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the mean hourly wage for transportation and material moving occupations in the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario metro at $23.93 as of May 2025, and that is the labor market our Jurupa Valley and Perris floors hire in.
Do the arithmetic. $500 buys roughly 21 hours of warehouse labor at that regional average, before payroll taxes, rent, racking, scanners, insurance, packaging supplies, our warehouse management system, and the person who picks up the phone when you call at 4pm on a Friday.
So the floor is not a profit line. It is close to the point where an account stops costing more to hold than it returns. That is also true at providers who do not publish a minimum. The cost is still there, and it gets recovered somewhere, usually inside the per-order and per-touch rates. Worth asking where.
There is real setup work behind it too. Store integration runs 1 to 3 business days, and we get accounts to live orders in 5 to 7 business days, which covers SKU setup, bin assignment, carrier configuration and test orders before your first real one ships. Our onboarding timeline walks through what happens in each of those days.
The order volume that clears $500
We do not publish a flat rate card, because volume, product size, SKU count and handling requirements move the number too much for one to be honest. What we do publish is what fulfillment actually costs line by line, and we send a complete proposal within 24 hours so you can run this calculation with your own numbers.
The calculation is simple. Take the blended per-order cost in your quote, then divide 500 by it. That is the order count that clears the floor.
At a blended $3.50 an order, 143 orders a month clears it. At $5.00, 100 orders clears it. Those two figures are arithmetic, not our rate card, so use your own quoted rates. Add receiving and storage on top and the break-even count drops further, because those charges count toward the same invoice.
In practice, brands shipping 100 or more orders a month clear the floor without ever thinking about it. The brands who feel it are the ones sitting at 30 or 40 orders, and for them the minimum is often the largest line on the bill.
One question to put to us and to everyone else you are quoting: does pass-through postage count toward the minimum? It changes the break-even more than any other line item, and the answer varies by provider. Get it in writing in the proposal.
The months when a minimum actually costs you
Seasonal brands do not pay a minimum in November. They pay it in February.
The scale of that swing is bigger than most founders plan for. On a not-adjusted basis, US retail ecommerce sales fell 17.2 percent from the fourth quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026, from $365.2 billion to $302.3 billion, according to the Census Bureau’s quarterly ecommerce report. Your own curve is probably sharper than the national one.
Run it before you sign. If your November invoice lands at $1,900 and your February charges come to $410, you pay $90 on top in February. Three light months like that cost you a few hundred dollars across the year. That is a number you can decide about in advance, which is the entire point of publishing it.
What you will not see on top of that: peak season surcharges, account management fees, charges for receiving reports or inventory counts, or exit penalties. We bill month to month. Our post on the fees that quietly eat margin covers the charges that do show up elsewhere in this industry and what to ask about each one.
Who should not call us yet
This is the part most fulfillment pages leave out.
Under 50 orders a month with no growth plan. Keep fulfilling in-house. A spare room, a thermal printer and a Saturday afternoon costs less than any 3PL, and the minimum would be the biggest line on your invoice. We would rather tell you that now than onboard you and watch you leave in four months. If you are trying to work out where that line sits for your brand, when outsourcing actually pencils out has the numbers.
Most of your customers are east of the Mississippi and speed is the priority. Geography beats service every time. We ship 1 to 2 day ground to California, Arizona and Nevada, covering more than 50 million consumers, and all 48 contiguous states through our carrier network. But a provider with East Coast warehouses will reach a Boston customer faster than we will, and nothing we do on our floor changes the map.
Lowest price above everything else. Someone will beat our number. There is always a cheaper quote, usually from a building further from your customers or a provider recovering the gap in accessorial charges. We do not compete on being cheapest and we will not pretend otherwise on a sales call.
Cold chain or hazmat. We do not handle temperature-controlled or hazardous goods. Ask for a specialist, and ask to see the certifications.
You would rather use a ticket queue. Our model is a named contact and a direct phone number. That is a preference, not a virtue, and some operators genuinely prefer a portal and a support inbox. If that is you, we are the wrong shape.
Six questions to ask about any 3PL minimum
Ask these of us and of everyone else on your shortlist. Ask for the answers in the written proposal, not on the call.
- Is the minimum an invoice floor or an order-count requirement?
- Does pass-through postage count toward it?
- Is there a ramp period before it applies to a new account?
- Does it escalate at renewal, and by how much?
- Is it billed monthly, or committed annually?
- What does exiting look like: notice period, exit fees, and who pays to move the inventory out?
A provider who answers all six in writing is telling you how the relationship will go when something is disputed. A provider who talks around question two or six is telling you the same thing.
Find out where you land in 24 hours
Send us your average and peak monthly order volume, your SKU count, your product dimensions and weight, the platforms you sell on, and any special handling you need. You get a complete line-item proposal within 24 hours, and you can run the division above yourself.
If the numbers say you are better off fulfilling in-house for another two quarters, we will tell you that in the same 24 hours. Request a proposal or call sales on (949) 468-7759, Monday to Saturday, 8am to 6pm PST.
FAQ
A 3PL monthly minimum is a floor on your invoice, not a limit on how many orders you can ship. If your charges for the month come in below the floor, the provider bills the difference. It exists because carrying an account costs the warehouse labor, space and system time whether or not you ship.
We invoice a $500 per month minimum. We do not publish an order-count requirement to open an account, though most brands we work with ship 100 or more orders a month and clear the floor on charges alone.
We bill the difference up to $500. There is no penalty on top of it, no annual commitment, and no exit fee if you decide to leave.