Ecommerce logistics costs: how to calculate them

The logistics cost of an ecommerce store isn't just what the courier charges you. It's the sum of everything that happens from the moment stock comes through the door to when the order reaches the customer (and sometimes comes back): goods-in, storage, picking, packaging, transport, returns and the hours your team spends firefighting. The figure that actually helps you decide is a single one: total logistics cost per order.

For a store shipping within Spain with small orders, that number tends to sit, roughly speaking, between 5 and 9 euros per order including transport. Where you land within that range depends on your volume, the size of your boxes and, above all, how many costs you're leaving out of the calculation without realising it. Below is how to calculate it properly, an example with figures, and how to compare carrier rates without any nasty surprises on your first invoice.

What makes up ecommerce logistics costs

Goods-in

Unloading, counting parcels, checking SKUs against the delivery note, labelling anything that arrives without a barcode and putting it away. It sounds like a small thing, but a poorly checked intake is behind half the problems you see weeks later: a size M logged as an L, an order that goes out incomplete, stock that says it's there and isn't.

Storage

Charged per pallet, per location, per cubic metre or per unit. No model is inherently better: per pallet gives you predictability if your stock arrives palletised and rotates steadily; per location suits catalogues with many small SKUs. What is universal is that stock that doesn't move still costs money. If you've got two pallets of a collection that hasn't shifted in six months, you're paying for them every month even if the rate looks low. If you want to dig deeper into this model, here's how