There is a specific moment most online sellers in Kenya recognise. Orders are growing, which is the good news. But the spare room is full of stock, someone is spending their evenings taping boxes, and half of yesterday went to chasing a rider on WhatsApp who has gone quiet with three parcels and the cash from two of them.

That is the point where outsourcing fulfillment starts to look attractive. Whether it actually makes financial sense is a different question, and it depends almost entirely on your order volume. Here is how to work it out honestly.

First, work out what you are already paying

Most sellers underestimate in-house fulfillment because the costs are scattered and some of them never appear on an invoice. Before comparing anything, add up what you genuinely spend each month:

• Storage. If stock lives in a rented unit, that is a clear number. If it lives in your house or shop, it still has a cost, because it is space you cannot use for anything else.
• Labour. Whoever picks, packs and labels, whether that is staff or you. Count the hours honestly.
• Packaging materials. Boxes, tape, bubble wrap, labels and the printer cartridges nobody budgets for.
• Delivery. Rider payments, fuel, or whatever you pay per drop.
• Failed deliveries. The order that goes out twice because the customer did not pick up, and the fuel spent on both attempts.
• Cash handling. Time spent reconciling cash-on-delivery collections, plus whatever you occasionally never recover.
• Your own time. The hours not spent on marketing, buying or talking to customers.

Divide that total by your monthly orders. That per-order figure is the number that matters, and for most sellers it is higher than they expect.

What outsourced fulfillment actually costs

Third-party logistics pricing looks complicated at first because it is broken into separate fees. Once you see what each one covers, it is straightforward. These are our own published rates, so you can put real numbers against your own volumes:

• Receiving — $10 per pallet. A one-off cost when your stock arrives, covering inspection, counting and putting it away.
• Storage — $0.35 per cubic metre per day. You pay for the space your stock actually occupies, so it shrinks as you sell.
• Fulfillment — $3.00 per order in Kenya. Picking the item, packing it and preparing it for dispatch.
• Last-mile delivery — from KSh 250 one-way within the Nairobi CBD zone, rising by distance. There is also a flat KSh 400 option across zones one to three if your orders are spread around the city.
• Cash on delivery — 3% of cash collected, covering collection from your customer and remittance to you.
• Returns — $0.70 per returned order, covering the item coming back into stock.

The important thing about this structure is not any individual number. It is that almost all of it is variable. If you have a slow month, you pay less. Rent and salaries do not work that way.

The real question: fixed versus variable

This is where the decision usually gets made, and it is not really about the per-order cost at all.

Running fulfillment in-house means committing to fixed costs. The store rent is the same in a quiet January as in a busy December. The person you hired to pack orders is paid whether forty orders come in or four hundred. You are betting on a volume you have not sold yet.

Outsourcing converts most of that into a variable cost that moves with your sales. In a business with seasonal peaks, or one still finding its footing, that shift matters more than saving a few shillings per parcel. It also means a sudden spike, a successful campaign, a holiday rush, does not require you to hire and train anyone.

The flip side is honest too: at very low volumes, outsourcing is usually more expensive per order than doing it yourself. There is a minimum monthly billing of $100 on our fulfillment service, and if you are shipping twenty orders a month, that is hard to justify. Below roughly a hundred orders a month, handling it yourself often still wins on pure cost.

When outsourcing is the wrong answer

It is worth being direct about the cases where you should not do this, because no logistics partner suits every business.

If your packaging is a core part of the product experience and involves handwriting, assembly or genuine craft, a third party will not replicate it in the same way. If you sell a handful of very high value items each month, the cost per order rarely works out. And if your stock needs specialised handling, temperature control or licensing, you need a partner set up specifically for that rather than a general fulfillment centre.

What to ask before you sign with anyone

If the numbers do point towards outsourcing, the choice of partner matters more than the price difference between them. Questions worth asking any provider, including us:

• Where exactly do you deliver, and what is the delivery window outside the major towns?
• How quickly is cash on delivery remitted, and how is it reconciled?
• What happens when an order is lost or damaged, and what is your process?
• Can I see my stock levels myself, or do I have to phone and ask?
• Who is my point of contact when something goes wrong at 4pm on a Friday?
• How do returns get back into sellable stock, and how long does that take?

Any provider worth using will answer all six without hesitating. Vague answers to the cash remittance question in particular are worth paying attention to.

Working it out for your business

The honest summary is that outsourcing fulfillment is not automatically cheaper. It becomes cheaper somewhere between one hundred and three hundred orders a month for most sellers, and it becomes valuable earlier than that if your constraint is time rather than money.

If you want to put real numbers against it, send us your monthly order volume, roughly where your customers are, and what you are shipping. We will work out what it would cost through us so you can compare it against your own figure. No obligation, and if the answer is that you are better off as you are, we will tell you.

Read next

• How to choose a fulfillment partner in Kenya — if the numbers point towards outsourcing, this is how to pick someone.
• What cash on delivery really costs you — the hidden cost that distorts every calculation above.

Our own services are described in full on the order fulfillment and warehousing and storage pages.

GreyBox Courier & Fulfillment Centre
Shankardass House, Moi Avenue, Nairobi
info@greyboxcourier.com · +254 711 272 820