Operations
Fulfilment mode comparison calculator
Choosing a fulfilment mode on fee tables alone is how sellers end up working sixty hours a week to save eleven rupees an order. This compares every mode your marketplace offers on the fees, then adds the three costs the fee table never shows you.
Your product and your month
What self shipping one parcel costs you.
Your baseline. It is adjusted per mode below.
Yours or whoever packs the orders.
What money costs you a year, borrowed or otherwise.
Self Ship
Best on profit once the hidden costs are counted
₹263.50
Real profit per unit
₹1,05,402
Across 400 units
₹2,709
Ahead of Easy Ship
Self Ship wins on fees and it stays ahead once the hidden costs are added, by ₹6.77 a unit against Easy Ship. That is the comfortable case, and it is the less common one.
Mode by mode
1. Self Ship
Cheapest on paper and the most work in practice. Your courier, your packing, your problem when a parcel goes missing.
₹263.50
29.3% margin
- On the rate card
- ₹313.84
- Failed deliveries
- -₹20.70
- Your time
- -₹29.17
- Cash tied up
- -₹0.47
About 46.7 hours of packing a month at this volume, and a failed delivery rate of roughly 9.5%.
2. Easy Ship
You hold the stock and pack each order, the marketplace collects and delivers. Middle ground on both cost and effort.
₹256.73
28.6% margin
- On the rate card
- ₹290.62
- Failed deliveries
- -₹16.59
- Your time
- -₹16.67
- Cash tied up
- -₹0.63
About 26.7 hours of packing a month at this volume, and a failed delivery rate of roughly 7.0%.
3. FBA
Faster delivery promise, so fewer cancellations, but your stock sits in their warehouse for weeks before it sells and you pay storage the whole time.
₹242.86
27.0% margin
- On the rate card
- ₹261.12
- Failed deliveries
- -₹12.86
- Your time
- -₹2.08
- Cash tied up
- -₹3.31
About 3.3 hours of packing a month at this volume, and a failed delivery rate of roughly 5.3%.
How this works
- Every fulfilment mode the marketplace offers is run through the same fee engine with the same product, so the rate card part of the comparison is exact rather than remembered.
- Failed deliveries are then added, adjusted per mode. A warehouse backed delivery promise gets refused less often than a slow self shipped parcel, and a refused parcel costs both legs of shipping plus whatever comes back damaged.
- Packing time is costed at whatever an hour of your time is worth. Half a minute per order under warehouse fulfilment and seven minutes under self ship is a different business, not a different fee.
- Cash tied up in stock is charged at your cost of capital. Stock sitting in a fulfilment centre for three weeks before it sells is money you cannot spend on anything else.
- The winner is then compared against whichever mode looks cheapest on fees alone, because those two are frequently not the same and that is the entire point of the exercise.
Questions sellers ask
Is FBA worth it in India?
It depends almost entirely on price point and how fast the product sells. On a high value item that turns over in two weeks, the delivery promise and lower refusal rate usually pay for the pick and pack. On a cheap slow moving item, storage quietly eats the margin while you wait, and Easy Ship is the better answer.
Why does self ship look cheapest but rank last?
Because the courier bill is the smallest part of it. Self shipping means you pack every order, you chase every failed pickup, and your delivery promise is worse, which raises refusals. Once those are priced the saving usually disappears, and on high volume it goes negative.
What failed delivery rate should I put in?
Use your own from the last three months if you have it. If you are mostly prepaid, somewhere between two and six percent is normal. Cash on delivery is a different world and fifteen to thirty percent is common. The per mode adjustments are applied on top of whatever you enter.
Why charge for my own time?
Because it is the cost sellers most reliably forget and the one that decides whether the business can grow. Seven minutes an order is fine at fifty orders a month. At a thousand orders it is a full time job you have not hired for and have not priced.
Can I use different modes for different products?
Yes, and most healthy accounts do. Fast moving and high value goes to the warehouse, slow movers and bulky low value items stay with you. Run the calculator once per product group rather than deciding one policy for the whole catalogue.
Are the storage and pick and pack fees exact?
They are indicative and flagged as such. Storage in particular changes by season and by how much space your stock occupies. Check the current rate card before you commit a large catalogue to a mode on the strength of a few rupees.