Ecommerce businesses pay to ship, stock, and store products in warehouses, then they pay more to pack and send orders to customers. These expenses fall into the broad category of logistics costs, and without proper management, they can become a burden on your bottom line. 

Logistics costs are a critical part of a company’s supply chain, and they affect everything from profit margins to customer satisfaction. Read more about the various types of logistics costs and learn about strategies to manage them and enhance your business operations and profitability.

What are logistics costs?

Logistics costs encompass all the expenses related to the movement and storage of goods, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished products to customers. These costs vary greatly depending on your business model, industry, and logistics operations. A business selling large furniture will have a completely different cost structure than one selling cosmetics.

Logistic costs are categorized as either direct costs or indirect costs. Direct logistics costs can be traced to the movement and storage of goods, such as freight bills and warehouse rent. Indirect costs are less obvious and include expenses for customer service teams handling shipping inquiries, office supplies for the logistics department, and administrative overhead. A well-managed logistics framework helps your ecommerce business thrive.

Types of logistics costs

• Transportation costs
• Warehousing costs
• Inventory carrying costs
• Administrative and other costs

To accurately measure logistics costs, first break them down into their key components. The most common logistics costs are grouped into the following categories, each with its own set of hidden costs.

Transportation costs

Often the largest component of overall logistics costs, transportation costs are the expenses associated with the physical freight movement of goods. They include:

• Freight and shipping. This is the primary cost paid to shipping carriers such as DHL, FedEx, and UPS for transporting goods. It’s influenced by weight, volume, distance, and speed. It also includes special services like last-mile delivery, which is the final and often most expensive step of the delivery process. 

• Fuel surcharges. Carriers often add fuel surcharges to their base rates to account for fluctuating fuel prices, which are often a volatile and significant additional cost.

• Labor. Labor costs include the wages and benefits for drivers and any staff involved in dispatch and transportation management.

• Reverse logistics. Reverse logistics is the cost of handling returns. It includes shipping costs for the customer to send an item back, the labor to inspect and restock the item, and any possible loss if the product is damaged.

• Detention and demurrage. Carriers sometimes charge detention and demurrage fees to cover their equipment costs when trucks or shipping containers are held at a pickup or delivery location longer than the allotted time.

Warehousing costs

Warehousing costs are the expenses related to storing and managing inventory in your distribution centers. Common warehousing costs include:

• Facilities. These are the costs related to renting or owning a physical space, including the lease or mortgage payment, property taxes, and insurance for the building. Optimizing every square foot of warehouse space is critical for cost savings.

• Equipment. This covers the purchase, lease, and maintenance costs for all warehouse equipment—forklifts, pallet jacks, conveyor belts, packing stations, and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or warehouse management system (WMS) software you use to run the operation.

• Labor. Labor costs are a huge part of warehouse operations. They include wages for warehouse staff performing tasks like receiving inbound shipments, placing items into storage space, picking customer orders, packing them securely, and preparing them for shipment.

• Utilities and security. This includes electricity to power the facility and the equipment, heating and cooling, water, and the costs for security systems, guards, and other measures to prevent damage and theft.

Inventory carrying costs

Also referred to as holding costs, inventory carrying costs are the hidden costs related to simply holding inventory and tying up capital. These include:

• Capital. This is the opportunity cost of the money you have invested in inventory. You could have used this money elsewhere, earning a return. This is the single largest component of inventory carrying costs, typically representing 40% to 60% of the total expense of holding inventory.

• Storage. Storage costs refer to the direct costs of storing the goods, which overlap with warehousing costs but are calculated on a per-item basis. They include the cost of the physical space, utilities, and labor required to manage the stored inventory.

• Risk. The category of risk costs covers several potential losses. Obsolescence occurs when an item becomes irrelevant or outdated before it sells or—in the case of perishable goods—spoils. Shrinkage refers to inventory lost due to fraud, theft, or damage. Insurance policies that cover replacement costs for lost or damaged inventory are also in this category.

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Administrative and other costs

This is a catchall for the various indirect costs that support logistics systems. This category includes:

• Technology. Includes licensing fees for logistics software like a transportation management system or warehouse management system, hardware like scanners and printers, and the tech staff to support them.

• Packaging. The costs of packaging materials, such as boxes, mailers, tape, void fill, and shipping labels, can add up quickly over thousands of orders.

• Customer service. Allocate a portion of your customer service team’s pay to logistics because they spend time answering questions about order status, tracking shipments, and working on issues related to shipping delays.

Strategies to reduce logistics costs

• Rethink warehouse layout
• Embrace technology and automation
• Negotiate with logistics service providers
• Optimize inventory management
• Consolidate shipments
• Analyze your transportation network

Effectively managing logistics expenses is an ongoing process. Finding savings improves your profitability and enables the rest of the business to operate more smoothly. Here are a few proven tips to help you reduce costs and create leaner operations:

Rethink warehouse layout

A disorganized warehouse is an expensive warehouse. Implement slotting strategies to place your most frequently ordered items in locations near packing stations. This simple change reduces the time pickers spend searching for products. When you multiply that time saved by hundreds or thousands of orders each day, the labor cost savings become substantial. It means each employee can pick more orders in the same amount of time, lowering your cost per order.

The cost of a warehouse entails using that space efficiently. By using taller shelving and pallet racks, you can store more inventory within the same physical footprint. This lets you avoid the expense of moving to a larger facility or paying for overflow storage, saving you money on rent, as well as utilities and property taxes.

A well-designed warehouse should also have a one-way, logical flow that goes from receiving to storage, picking and packing, and finally, shipping. This avoids congestion, minimizes backtracking, and reduces the risk of misplacing products or accidents—all of which create costly delays.

Embrace technology and automation

Technology adoption is an investment that pays for itself by increasing speed and providing data for better decision-making. A modern WMS does more than track inventory; it can generate the most effective pick paths for workers, direct them to precise bin locations, and let you manage inventory levels in real time. This reduces costs by minimizing errors with picking and providing performance data to better manage labor.

Although a highly automated warehouse is a major investment, even small-scale automation can bring significant returns. For example, automated packing machines can build and seal boxes faster and more consistently than humans, increasing order throughput. Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) can transport pallets, freeing up skilled forklift operators for more complex tasks. These technologies can reduce use of manual labor, operate 24/7, and complete repetitive tasks with much higher accuracy.

Technology collects data that is a goldmine for cost reduction. Analyzing this data can reveal which products cost you the most to store, which shipping carriers perform poorly, or which employees are most productive. This lets you make informed decisions and avoid guesswork.

Negotiate with logistics service providers

Shipping is one of the biggest expenses in logistics, and you shouldn’t assume that the initial quoted rate is the best you can get. To negotiate effectively, learn the market rate. You can regularly use freight auditing services or comparison platforms to see what your competitors are paying. When you approach your carrier with data showing that other providers offer better rates for similar volumes, you gain powerful leverage to negotiate more favorable rates.

Carriers value consistent, predictable demand. By consolidating your volume with one or a few primary carriers, you become a more valued partner. This relationship can lead to significant volume cost reductions, more favorable payment terms, and a greater willingness by carriers to negotiate on fuel surcharges, liability coverage, and residential delivery fees, which can mount quickly. The key is to see it as a true partnership.

Don’t just focus on the per-package cost. You can also negotiate the dimensional (DIM) weight factor, which accounts for a package’s volume rather than just its weight. This can drastically lower costs for large, lightweight packages.

Optimize inventory management

Using historical sales data and market trends to predict future demand is the most effective way to improve inventory management. Overstocking ties up capital in products that aren’t selling and inflates your carrying costs, such as rent, insurance, security, and potential product obsolescence. Understocking leads to lost sales and frustrated customers. Accurate forecasting finds the sweet spot, minimizing both of these costly problems.

This is where diligent profit and loss (P&L) analysis and projections can help reveal areas for improvement. If you see your cost of goods sold (COGS) creeping up, it’s a signal to investigate. Are your purchasing costs too high? Are you writing off too much damaged stock? Is inbound freight costing more? The P&L statement tells you exactly where to look for cost-saving opportunities.

Consolidate shipments

Whenever possible, consolidating smaller shipments into fewer, larger ones is a direct path to lower freight costs. Shipping one large pallet is almost always cheaper than shipping 20 individual boxes that add up to the same weight and volume. This lets you move from expensive less-than-truckload (LTL) or parcel rates to more cost-effective full-truckload (FTL) rates. The cost per pound drops significantly as the total shipment size increases.

A single consolidated shipment is also handled much less often than multiple individual packages. Every time a package is handled, there is the risk of it being damaged, lost, or sent to the wrong place. Consolidation minimizes these occurrences, which reduces the cost associated with replacing damaged goods or resolving shipping errors.

Analyze your transportation network

The location of your distribution centers has a huge impact on shipping costs and delivery speed. If the majority of your customers are on the West Coast, but your only warehouse is in New York, you’re paying a premium to ship each order cross-country. Regularly analyzing your sales data to find your customer concentration can indicate whether investing in a new, strategically placed distribution center would lower shipping costs and provide a better customer experience.

For long-haul shipments between major hubs, intermodal transport (using a combination of rail and truck) is often cheaper, although it’s somewhat riskier than just using a truck. Analyzing your shipping routes can identify opportunities to use more cost-effective transportation modes. Also, customer locations change, carrier rates fluctuate, and fuel costs vary. A transportation network that was optimal two years ago might be inefficient today. A regular review of your network ensures you are continuously adapting to find the most cost-effective way to get your products to your customers.