For small online shops
Fulfilment without a warehouse
Most fulfilment centres start being interesting somewhere around a few hundred orders a month. Below that you are paying setup fees and monthly storage on a pallet space you barely use. This is the version for shops that are not there yet — and for shops that never want to be.
The portal is in English. Sign up with just your email address — no contract, no minimum.
- Identity-checked
- Your stock stays yours — start with one box
- Lost in transit? Claim through the carrier
- How that works →
The four ways to get an order out the door
Honestly compared, including the one where we lose. Ask any provider below for their own rate card rather than taking a number off a page like this one.
Pack it yourself
Free in money and expensive in hours. It works, right up until the hour a day it takes is the hour you needed for something else. Nothing here beats it on cost — only on your time.
No fee. One to two hours a day at real volume.
A 3PL or fulfilment centre
Professional, scalable, and priced for scale. The cost is five separate lines: setup, storage per pallet per month, pick and pack per order, inbound handling, and the carrier label. The first two do not shrink when you have a slow month.
Usually a minimum order volume, plus fixed monthly cost.
Amazon FBA
Excellent if Amazon is your channel. Less so if it is not: your stock sits in their network, on their terms, with their fee schedule and their storage charges, and getting it back out is its own process.
Per-unit fees plus storage, and a channel you may not sell on.
AirPost
A verified person near your customers stores a small batch of your stock at home, packs each order and drops it at a service point. You pay per parcel that actually goes out. Nothing while a box sits still.
€0.85 platform fee per parcel, plus the carrier label and the fee your sender sets.
Where this loses: large or heavy items, chilled goods, and stock in the thousands of units. Space in someone's home is limited, and stretching that is how both sides end up unhappy.
What it costs, in full
Three lines, and there is no fourth.
The platform fee
€0.85 per parcel, flat, already included in every rate you see on this site.
The carrier label
The real rate for that size, that route and that carrier. Our shipping options page lists every one of them per country and per parcel size, live from the rate card.
Your sender's fee
Set by the person doing the work, shown on their profile before you agree to anything. It scales with the size of the parcel, because a 30 kg box is not the same job as a letterbox item.
No subscription. No setup fee. No storage cost. No minimum order volume. No notice period. A month with no orders costs you nothing.
See every carrier rate per countryHow it works
Four steps, and the first one is the only one that takes any effort.
- 1
Find someone near your customers
Browse senders by region and by the carriers they can use. Their rate, their capacity per week and the parcel sizes they accept are on their profile.
- 2
Send one test batch
One box of your bestsellers, twenty or so. No contract to sign first, and no commitment beyond that box.
- 3
Orders reach them automatically
You place the order, they get it, they pack it and drop it at a service point. You see each step, and so does your customer.
- 4
Scale, or stop
Send another batch, or add a second sender in another country. If it is not working, you ask for your stock back. There is nothing to cancel.
Start with one box of your bestsellers
Twenty units of the three things you sell most is enough to find out whether this works for you. It is a small enough number that a bad outcome costs you a box, and a big enough number that a good outcome is visible in your delivery times within a fortnight.
Whoever holds your stock is verified
A sender can only receive stock and pick up orders after two checks: an identity check with passport and selfie, and a payout account verified in their own name. That is not a badge on a profile but a limit in our database — without both, no order reaches them.
In transit the carrier is liable and we file the claim. Stock at your sender’s is not insured — hence the one box.
If you already live where you sell
Running a shop from the Netherlands, Belgium or Germany and selling to customers in that same country? Then the biggest objection on our other pages does not apply to you: your stock never leaves the country it is already taxed in, so there is no second VAT registration to take on.
What is left is the plain trade: someone else packs and drops off, you get your evenings back, and you pay per parcel instead of per month.
Questions sellers ask
Is there really no minimum?
No minimum order volume and no minimum term. One box and one order a week is a valid way to use this, and it is how most shops start. There is no storage fee, so a quiet month costs you nothing.
How is this different from a 3PL?
A 3PL has a warehouse, and a warehouse has fixed costs that get divided over your order count. That is why the good ones have minimums — below a certain volume it does not work out for you either. Here the storage is a shelf in someone's home, so there is no fixed cost to divide and no volume you have to reach first.
What sizes work?
Letterbox items and small to medium parcels work well. Large or heavy goods, chilled products and stock in the thousands of units do not — that is what a warehouse is for, and we will say so rather than take the order.
What if I need my stock back?
You ask for it. There is no notice period and no exit process, because there is no contract to exit. It is your stock the entire time.
Do you integrate with my shop platform?
Shopify: yes, through the Airpost Order Link app — paid orders reach your sender automatically and the tracking code goes back to your store. WooCommerce and marketplace integrations are on the roadmap and are not available today, and we would rather say that than list logos we cannot back up. Those orders go in through the app in the meantime.
More about the Shopify appDo I need a VAT registration in the country where my stock sits?
If you are not already established there, yes — holding stock in a country is doing business there, from the first day and with no threshold, and OSS does not replace it. We have a full article on what that means per situation. We do not register you and we do not give tax advice.
Which countries can I use?
The countries page shows what the rate card returns right now, per country and per parcel size, with the domestic delivery time next to it. It is generated from live data rather than written down, so it cannot promise a country we cannot actually serve.
Two related pages
This page is about cost and about the volume threshold. Delivery times across borders, and the Brexit-specific version for UK shops, are covered separately.