eCommerce fulfilment costs rarely get out of control because of one dramatic failure. More often than not, they creep up quietly when teams are forced to operate with incomplete, delayed or unreliable data.
Sometimes, the signals don’t trigger alarms, but show up as:
Over time, these issues compound, making eCommerce fulfilment costs much harder to control.
If your brand is scaling and operating across multiple channels, warehouses and regions, these issues can multiply even faster.
The uncomfortable truth behind modern eCommerce fulfilment costs is that they’re not just what you pay to fulfil orders, but what you also lose when decisions are made too late or with the wrong data.
Poor fulfilment performance doesn’t necessarily need high volume to start becoming expensive – it just needs repetition.
Whether it’s picking errors, delays in inventory updates or carrier issues that take too long to rise to the surface, these problems can create ongoing cost pressures across logistics, customer service, marketing and finance when combined.
And while your brand tries to keep these errors at a minimum, UK online retail sales grew 3.4% YoY to reach £127.41 billion in 2024. This means more orders, more volume, and more pressure placed on your systems – which is when the cracks are more likely to show.
Rather than one big crash or mistake, rising eCommerce fulfilment costs usually come from several issues that all bounce off one another.
One of the most common drivers of eCommerce fulfilment costs is inaccurate or delayed inventory data.
When the stock information you see doesn’t reflect reality, you might:
Research in the US states that 22% of online orders are cancelled due to poor inventory visibility, directly impacting revenue and customer trust.
Every time you cancel an order, it carries the following additional costs:
These costs often sit outside the direct lines of ‘fulfilment,’ so they’re easy to overlook or underestimate.
Late dispatches and missed delivery promises have a huge impact on customer satisfaction, bringing an increase in eCommerce fulfilment costs.
These financial consequences typically include:
When you look at the UK, delivery confidence is already fragile. Over two in three consumers (67%) experienced at least one delivery issue in 2024, and 78% say they’d like to see at least one service improvement across delivery services.
There’s not a lot of patience for inconsistency, so while bad delivery events are unavoidable at least some of the time, it’s vital to ensure that they’re not a regular occurrence.
If your brand lacks early visibility into carrier performance or regional delivery risks, problems are addressed reactively, meaning higher costs and a greater impact on the customer.
Arguably the least visible contributor to rising eCommerce fulfilment costs on this list is marketing spend.
When promotions and paid media don’t align with live inventory availability, fulfilment capacity or delivery performance, your brand might be attracting demand that it can’t fulfil.
This means:
This is one of the fastest – and most hidden – ways to lose margin, and one of the hardest to trace back to fulfilment decisions.
Returns should never be a fulfilment afterthought, but instead a key part of your eCommerce strategy.
In sectors like apparel and footwear, return rates can reach as high as 30%. That’s nearly one in three products that your brand must retrieve, grade, and potentially resell in the most cost-effective way.
When your returns data isn’t available in near-real time, you’ll:
When you add these issues together, they’ll quietly inflate your eCommerce fulfilment costs over time.
Visibility doesn’t just come down to having more dashboards, but instead having the right information early enough that you can act on it.
The most costly gaps tend to crop up in four key areas:
A common scenario might look like this: a product sells steadily, inventory data updates lag behind, orders keep flowing, and the issue only surfaces when cancellations or complaints hit your customer service inbox.
By then, costs come down to refunds, support, lost trust and wasted spend. This might be a simple example, but a look into how delayed data or poor visibility can result in unwanted costs.
Data latency and inconsistency are rarely catastrophic, but leave them to simmer and the costs can mount up.
Poor data can lead to:
Parcel volumes in the UK were forecast to hit 4.6 billion in 2025, showing a 5.7% YoY increase and adding further pressure to already stretched networks.
Add to the fact that your decisions are made on outdated data, and it’s likely that your eCommerce fulfilment costs will rise as a result.
To keep eCommerce fulfilment costs under control, your brand can’t rely on manual effort or constant firefighting. Instead, you need systems designed for visibility and early intervention.
A resilient fulfilment setup includes most or all of the following:
As you’re probably aware, technology is at the heart of keeping eCommerce fulfilment costs as low as possible over time. Although it won’t eliminate these costs entirely, it will prevent them from escalating unnecessarily.
Just because a brand has a healthy sales margin, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the fastest growing. The ones that win are those that combine consistent sales with effective operations behind the scenes.
These brands:
As pressure on brands grows and eCommerce fulfilment costs can rise in any direction, visibility and timely decision-making are the difference between fulfilment getting in the way of growth and being an active driver of taking your business to the next level.