When to outsource your ecommerce logistics (and when not to)

It's worth outsourcing your ecommerce logistics when preparing orders starts eating into hours you should be spending on selling, when mistakes grow at the same rate as orders, or when space and campaign peaks force you to improvise. There's no magic number. As a rough guide, many shops start feeling the bottleneck somewhere between 100 and 300 orders a month, but a shop with lots of sizes, bundles or bulky products will feel it sooner than one with five small SKUs.

The decision comes down to two things: the operational signs you're already seeing, and an honest breakdown of how much each order costs you today. If, with that breakdown in front of you, a logistics operator (3PL) comes out similar or cheaper and also gives you back time, you have your answer. If it comes out much more expensive and your operation is running smoothly, wait. Here's how to work out both.

Signs it's time to outsource your online shop's logistics

There's almost never a single day when everything collapses. What you tend to see is a build-up of small symptoms that gradually become normal. These are the most common ones:

• You're preparing orders outside working hours. If the founder or the ecommerce manager is packing boxes at night or on a Sunday, logistics is already eating into growth time.
• Your shop's stock doesn't match what's physically there. You sell a unit you don't have, or you've got stock the website marks as out of stock. Every overselling incident means a refund, an apology email, and a customer who might not come back.
• Picking errors keep happening. Wrong size, wrong colour, a missing unit in a three-item order. One mistake happens; if you see several a month, the process is relying on someone's memory.
• Morning orders go out two days later. Your delivery promise says 24-48 hours, but the order sits waiting for free hands.
• Finding an SKU takes minutes. Boxes in the garage, in the office, at a partner's house. Without fixed locations, every order becomes a little treasure hunt.
• Returns are piling up. Stock that could be resold sits in a corner unchecked, and the inventory counts it as sold, or as available when it isn't.
• Campaigns make you nervous. If you hold back a launch or a promotion because you're not sure you can fulfil the orders, logistics is capping your sales.

If you recognise yourself in three or more of these, it's worth running the numbers. You'll find a more detailed list in the signs of overstretched logistics.

The moments that speed up the decision

There are situations where keeping logistics in-house stops being a preference and becomes a risk: Black Friday, a launch you know is going to take off, starting to sell on Amazon alongside your own shop, or opening up shipping to Europe. What worked at 20 orders a day often breaks down at 80, not because your team is working worse, but because at that volume you need fixed locations, priority rules, validation and dispatch capacity that a manual process simply doesn't have.

The classic mistake is outsourcing right in the middle of peak season. An operator needs to receive your stock, set up the SKUs, connect the shop and test the flow. Doing that while orders are flooding in is the worst way to start. If your peak is November, the conversation needs to start well before that; we cover this in how to prepare your logistics for Black Friday.

When it's better to keep doing it yourself

Outsourcing isn't always the answer, and any operator who tells you otherwise is selling you something. Keeping logistics in-house makes sense when:

• You sell a small, steady number of orders, and preparing them doesn't eat into time for key tasks.
• Each unit is personalised or made to order, and fulfilment is tied closely to production.
• The product needs very specific handling: cold storage, technical assembly or checks a generalist operator can't do.
• You already have space paid off and a team with processes that work and that you can measure.

Even in that case, work as if you were going to outsource tomorrow: consistent SKUs, barcodes on everything, a log of goods in and out, and the real time each order takes. The day you decide to make the move, the migration will be far simpler.

There's also the hybrid model: you keep the artisanal, B2B or slow-moving stock in-house, and outsource the online shop catalogue that generates the most orders. It's a good way to trial an operator without moving everything at once.

When to outsource your ecommerce logistics: the numbers that decide

The most common mistake is comparing a 3PL's rate to the rent of a unit or a person's salary. That comparison leaves out half the cost. To work out what each order costs you today, add up, for a normal month:

• Picking hours: picking, packing, labelling, recording. Include your own, even if you don't pay yourself for them.
• Management hours: reconciling stock, dealing with courier issues, processing returns, answering