Most fulfillment companies do not enforce a hard order count. They enforce a dollar floor. Published monthly minimums run from $0 to about $750, and a 2025 industry survey of more than 600 warehouses put the average at $517 a month, which means a brand shipping 50 orders can pay roughly $10 an order before a single pick fee. The brands that get taken on — and quoted well — are the ones that arrive with clean SKU data, scannable barcodes, an inbound plan and twelve months of real order history. Below roughly 300 to 500 orders a month, shipping yourself is often still cheaper.
Why some fulfillment companies say no
The cost of taking on a new account is mostly front-loaded and mostly fixed. There is dock labor to receive the first shipment, a pallet position set aside, SKU records built in the warehouse system, an integration to your store, and a person who has to learn your product well enough to catch a mistake. Those costs land whether you ship 50 orders in month one or 5,000. Industry guidance on minimums is blunt about this: the floor exists to cover dock labor, reserved space and IT integration work that costs money whether or not the volume shows up.
So “we have a 500-order minimum” almost always means “below that, the setup does not pay for itself at the rates we quote.” It is a pricing problem, not a judgment about your brand. Some providers solve it with a dollar floor, some by declining, and a few by charging higher unit rates and taking you anyway.
Two different things get called a minimum
A minimum order volume
Around 500 orders a month is the number cited most often as a common threshold for a 3PL partnership. For context, published benchmarks put the typical mid-market client at 3,000 to 5,000 direct-to-consumer orders a month, with small accounts closer to 500 and mature brands above 20,000. Providers that market themselves as having no minimums will frequently take a brand at 50 to 100 orders a month — and still charge a minimum fee.
A minimum monthly spend
This is the real gate, and it is the one to ask about. Verified rate cards show monthly minimums ranging from $0 to about $750. The 2025 warehousing and fulfillment pricing survey put the average at $517 a month, up from $437.50 the year before, with a wider market range of roughly $250 to $2,000 and up. Not every provider uses a fixed number: at least one large network calculates the floor as your monthly order volume multiplied by its first-item pick fee, minus 20 percent, so the minimum moves with your own forecast.
Most providers do not publish any of this. A review of 300 fulfillment company websites found only about six percent mentioned minimums publicly. Assume there is one and ask for it in a number.
What “no minimums” actually costs
No minimum is not the same as no commitment, and it is not free. The trade is usually made in three places. Per-unit rates are higher, because nothing is subsidizing the fixed cost of your account. Space and labor are shared rather than reserved, which is what makes the flexibility possible. And accounts sitting at or below their minimum can drop down the priority list during peak, which is precisely when you least want to be there.
Honestly assessed: if your volume is steady and climbing, a committed minimum at better unit rates is usually the cheaper deal inside a year, and you should run that math rather than reflexively avoiding a floor. No-minimum pricing earns its keep when volume is low, lumpy, or genuinely unproven — a first retail order, a launch you cannot forecast, a seasonal product.
The floor that matters is economic, not contractual
Even where a provider will take you, there is a volume below which outsourcing costs more than it saves. Run the minimum through it. At the $517 survey average, 50 orders a month works out to about $10.34 per order before you have paid for one pick, one box or one label. Published all-in benchmarks land near $11.90 per order at 1,500 orders a month and nearer $10.60 at 5,000 — so at very low volume the minimum alone can eat most of what a well-run account would pay in total.
Below roughly 300 to 500 orders a month, most brands are better off packing in a garage or a small leased space. That is not a sales position; it is the arithmetic. What is also true is that outsourcing wins on your time and your error rate well before it wins on cost per order. If packing is eating the hours that should go into product and demand, that is a sound reason to hand it off at almost any volume — just do not expect the invoice to be smaller.
What to have ready before you ask for a quote
This is the part that actually decides whether providers compete for your account, and it is almost entirely within your control.
- Twelve months of order data. Orders per month, items per order, average weight and package dimensions, destination spread, and your returns rate. Most bad quotes are built on an average the brand guessed at. If you do not have twelve months, send what you have and label the gap rather than rounding it off.
- SKU master data in the format the provider asks for: identifiers such as GTIN or UPC, dimensions, weight, and hazard classification where it applies.
- Barcodes that scan. Units with no SKU or barcode have to be identified by hand, and that is one of the most common causes of a slow start.
- An inbound plan and an advance shipping notice — a box-by-box list of what is in the shipment, sent before the shipment arrives. Unlabeled cartons, and boxes that mix several products, are the other reliable source of delay.
- Your channel list. Every sales channel is its own connection, and each one adds time.
- Packaging and kitting decisions in writing: pack configurations, inserts, and assembly instructions for any bundle.
- Your compliance facts. Category requirements for food, supplements or limited-quantity hazmat, and whether you need lot or expiration capture. Say this early; it changes who can quote at all.
Onboarding timelines in the market vary more than any other number here. Technology-first providers quote 5 to 7 days. One aggregator puts the average for a new brand client at 8 to 12 weeks. Independent guidance suggests 2 to 6 weeks for a small merchant under 1,000 SKUs, stretching to 6 to 12 weeks once several channels have to be integrated, and 90 days or more for enterprise asset-based warehouses. Arrive with the list above and you land at the fast end of whichever range applies to you.
Three questions that reveal whether a provider wants your account
“What is your monthly minimum, and what happens in a month I am under it?” A provider who will not answer that in a number before you sign will not get clearer afterward.
“Will you price this against my actual order profile, line by line?” Hand over your data and ask for an itemized quote against it. Our guide to how fulfillment pricing really works covers which lines to look at, and how pricing works here sets out the same structure.
“Who will I be talking to in month three?” Small accounts at large networks often onboard with a named person and then land in a ticket queue. Ask for the name, and ask what happens to it once you are live. The related question — what accuracy and on-time figures they actually measure — is covered in what error rate to expect from a 3PL.
Where Minimus fits, and where it does not
Minimus ships direct-to-consumer and B2B out of a 38,000 square foot ambient facility in Thousand Oaks, California, at hundreds to thousands of orders a day, with an order error rate under one percent and a 9:00am Pacific same-day cutoff. Peak capability has been demonstrated at 50,000 orders in a single day on a special project, and no peak-season volume commitment is required. Palletized receiving is free rather than a billed line item; floor-loaded freight carries an hourly rate to palletize it for movement and storage. Inventory insurance is $2,500 per pallet as standard, with higher limits available for an additional fee. For brands that do not need same-day processing, there is a discounted three-day program. There is a rate card; it is quoted against your order profile rather than published, which is why the data above matters.
Minimus will take a brand earlier than a national network typically will — a brand shipping 10 to 20 orders a day can be onboarded here. That is not the business the operation is built around, and it is worth being straight about it: the economics work on accounts shipping hundreds to thousands of orders a day. What a smaller brand gets is the same warehouse, the same cutoff and the same people, not a starter tier with a different service level attached.
Where it is not the right fit: storage is ambient only, with no refrigerated or frozen space. No alcohol. No GFSI, SQF or BRCGS certification. Minimus is not the importer of record. Supplement lot-number capture on outbound shipments is an optional paid add-on rather than a standard feature. For refrigerated, frozen, alcohol or a GFSI-scheme program, Minimus acts as a referral partner instead of the provider. If your product needs one of those, the useful answer is a name, not a quote. The full list of registrations and limits is on the compliance page, and the facility itself is described on the Thousand Oaks page.
Figures quoted from industry surveys and published rate cards are market benchmarks, not Minimus pricing, and are included so you can sanity-check any quote you receive.
Small brands3PL minimumsFulfillment