Fulfillment costs & services at a glance

The cheapest provider is not the one with whom you will work successfully for many years. Scalable & reliable fulfillment with RHIEM, our associated premium services & their costs at a glance show you a benchmark for successful fulfillment without stress & worries

What services does RHIEM’s Premium Fulfillment actually include?

RHIEM is a global and very reliable full-service fulfillment provider, where you can outsource the entire store logistics from order acceptance to complete delivery & billing of the order including returns management.
As a 3PL fulfillment provider, RHIEM takes on all the services you want to outsource – we do not work with rigid and inflexible prices, but always with completely individual and customizable modular prices, which we calculate with you specifically on the basis of your requirements.
Therefore, a statement about the actual costs of your fulfillment with us is hardly possible without an extensive discussion, detailed planning and calculated offer – but below we give you a first insight into our offer & cost structures, so that you can better assess the extent to which RHIEM can become your future & reliable fulfillment service provider.

Goods storage & transparent warehousing

Fulfillment by RHIEM requires that you store your products with us. This is exactly where the complexity of the costs begins: How many items do you want to store with us? How big and how heavy are they? Do all items have to be counted individually? Does a visual inspection have to be carried out for each item before storage?

As you can quickly see, the individual putaway costs already vary greatly at goods receipt: a soccer ball manufacturer with large quantities but few SKUs will generate significantly different putaway costs than a cosmetics manufacturer who wants to put away many small SKUs but smaller quantities.

At RHIEM, the costs for pure warehousing are determined by SKU, picking location or warehouse card.

Picking, packing & perfect order picking

The pure picking costs can also hardly be determined in general – we generally calculate picking costs according to SKU & the number of individual picks. However, items in B2B or B2C fulfillment make significant differences, because the individual picks or quantities per order are significantly different here and naturally have an impact on the price.

RHIEM has fully digitalized and intelligent warehouse logistics. This means that, depending on the customer, we can differentiate whether several orders can be made at the same time or only one pick per picker. Of course, this also has an influence on the final price for fulfillment.

The shipping packaging itself also plays a decisive role in fulfillment costs. The wine bottles need certified outer cartons to protect the fragile product in the best possible way – this special packaging is more complex to produce and therefore more expensive than the soccer manufacturer’s transport packaging.

Customized products have been the trend for years – a supplier of individually flocked jerseys also produces significantly more work per order than the wine merchant and also significantly more work than the football manufacturer. We carry out such jersey flocking for our long-standing customer Schalke 04.

The (international) dispatch of order data & the processing of the orders themselves

You benefit from our shipping volume and the associated fleet prices of the shippers! For the various transport companies, it is of course much more lucrative to come to us with a truck to load thousands of orders than to come to each retailer individually to pick up just a few orders.

But despite this significant simplification of transport routes, we can hardly make any generally binding statements about the price of fulfillment, even when it comes to shipping costs. The price per delivery naturally depends on the size and weight of the product, its labeling requirements or destination address: if goods are shipped internationally, the price may be higher. Customs documents and accompanying documents, special labeling requirements or certain limit quantities for dangerous goods.

When or for whom is a filler worthwhile?

If you take a moment to add up your costs for your own warehouse, your employees, their vacation and sick days, your costs for various packaging and packaging materials, you will very quickly come up with five to six-digit amounts per month.

In fulfillment, we take all these problems off your hands at once! You no longer need your own warehouse, no expensive warehouse staff, no energy costs for heating and air-conditioning warehouse and hall space, and no provisions for shipping materials. And what’s more: with RHIEM as your fulfillment partner, you have unique opportunities for scaling! Because we already ship to almost every country in the world – your next step in scaling your business is just a few steps away thanks to our existing logistics network and expertise. And a step into European or global logistics is also possible for you without any new know-how transfer, because all logistical expertise is already available at RHIEM and you can access it immediately!

So if you’re thinking about the next step in scaling, it’s definitely worth talking to RHIEM as your next fulfillment partner. The rule of thumb that you should have at least 500 orders per month to make external fulfillment worthwhile also applies.

Fulfillment – the composition of costs

As you have seen so far, the costs for fulfillment are highly individual. No customer has the same service requirements as another, and hardly any product has identical requirements in terms of labeling obligations, dimensions, weight or transport protection.
Our costs for global fulfillment are roughly made up of the following parameters:

Processing returns – full service for eCommerce companies

When your orders leave our warehouse, you and the recipient always have a transparent overview of the delivery status – so you can also see when an order is sent back to us by the customer.

In the run-up to our cooperation, you specify exactly how we should handle these returns. For example, you could specify that we should only carry out a visual inspection of the returned product. If the visual inspection reveals damage that impairs the function, you can specify how we should proceed. destruction of the item or a discussion with you to check whether you can restore the function by repair.

We agree the price of all services and the associated expenses with you before the order is placed – so there are no unpleasant and sudden surprises in returns management and you can take care of the further sale of your items in peace.

How much does fulfillment cost?

Let’s turn the question around: What does warehousing cost you? The hall rental and its heating or air conditioning? The packing and shipping materials that you always need to have in stock in various sizes and in sufficient quantities? What about the countless votes on labeling requirements or customs documents? How much time do your employees spend on semi-automated and almost-functional packaging processes? Do you also need to double your warehouse capacity in time for Christmas, but can manage with half the capacity for the rest of the year? How often are you annoyed by incorrect deliveries or incomplete parcels?

External fulfillment with RHIEM takes all these costs and worries off your hands. Of course, fulfillment costs a lot of money in clinical terms – but this money is largely used depending on orders and sales. The same capital is tied up in your own warehouse and cannot be used for marketing or sales.

Let’s look at the costs together – and also at the possibilities and market opportunities! You should then decide whether external fulfillment costs too much.
Costs for fulfillment services – always individually tailored to your needs
RHIEM has been providing successful and sustainable fulfillment for global brands and major retailers in B2B and B2C for decades. Thanks to our experience, know-how and expertise in various market segments, we can provide you with a fulfillment offer that is precisely tailored to your requirements. Let’s look together at how we can scale your eCommerce sales.