This holiday season, Amazon charges $6.37 to pick, pack and ship one of White Mountain Puzzles' best-selling jigsaw puzzles when it sells on Amazon. If the same puzzle sold on the brand's own website and Amazon shipped it from the same shelf, the fee would be $11.35. That gap is the main reason sellers start looking at a third-party logistics company, or 3PL. This page sets out when a seller needs a 3PL, Amazon's FBA or Amazon's bulk-storage service AWD, using published prices only. It also shows how the multi-channel businesses in our data fulfil their orders.
FBA, AWD, MCF and a 3PL: what each one does
These four are often compared as if they were the same thing. They do different jobs.
- FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) stores your stock in Amazon's fulfilment centres and ships your Amazon orders, with Prime. You pay a fee per unit sold, set by size, weight and price, plus monthly storage.
- AWD (Amazon Warehousing and Distribution) is bulk storage behind FBA. Amazon describes it as a bulk storage service that sends your stock on to FBA automatically, and to other sales channels such as Walmart Fulfillment Services. It does not ship to customers itself.
- MCF (Multi-Channel Fulfillment) lets Amazon ship orders from your other channels, such as your own website, out of the stock you already hold in FBA.
- A 3PL is an independent warehouse that stores your stock and ships orders from any channel: your website, TikTok Shop, Etsy, wholesale cartons to shops, or bulk shipments into Amazon. Pricing is usually per order plus storage.
When you need which
| Your situation | What usually fits | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Almost all sales on Amazon | FBA | Prime, and no warehouse to run. |
| Amazon seller with big seasonal swings or a full container | FBA plus AWD | AWD storage costs less than FBA's and has no holiday surcharge, and Amazon refills FBA from it |
| Mostly Amazon, with a small own-website channel | FBA plus MCF | One pool of stock and no second warehouse, at a higher fee per order |
| A real share of sales off Amazon, or wholesale to shops | A 3PL, often alongside FBA | One warehouse ships every channel, including cartons to retailers |
| Made-to-order or personalised products | Ship them yourself, or from the workshop | Nothing exists to store until the order comes in |
None of these is all or nothing. Most of the multi-channel businesses below use FBA for Amazon and something else for everything else.
What FBA costs
FBA's fee depends on the product's size tier, its shipping weight and its price. Amazon publishes three rate cards: 2026 non-peak (15 January to 14 October), the 2026 holiday peak (15 October to 14 January 2027) and 2027 non-peak. A 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge has applied on top since 17 April 2026. Two examples from our data, surcharge included:
| Product | Size and weight band | FBA fee, non-peak | FBA fee, holiday peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| White Mountain Puzzles 1,000-piece puzzle, $19.99 | Large standard, 1.75 to 2 lb | $6.02 | $6.37 |
| Mount Cleverest trivia deck, $16.99 | Large standard, 4 to 8 oz | $4.09 | $4.36 |
Both non-peak fees match the per-listing fee Amazon charges these sellers, as Keepa records it. Storage is charged on top: for standard-size items, $0.78 per cubic foot a month from January to September and $2.40 from October to December, before any storage-utilisation surcharge. Every rate is in our Amazon FBA fees for 2026 guide, and the Amazon FBA calculator works them out for any product.
What AWD costs
From Amazon's AWD page, read on 10 November 2026, at base rates:
| Charge | Base rate |
|---|---|
| Storage, West Coast region | $0.57 per cubic foot a month |
| Storage, East Coast, South East and South Central | $0.48 per cubic foot a month |
| Inbound processing | $1.40 per box ($1.05 in the West Coast Palletizable region) |
| Outbound processing | $1.40 per box |
| Transportation | $1.40 per cubic foot |
Amazon's page lists discounts of 10% on storage for its "smart storage" rate and 20% for its "Amazon managed" rate, and a $0.35 promotional discount on inbound boxes received by 31 December 2026. It also says three things that matter for the comparison: AWD pricing covers FBA inbound placement, so there is no separate charge for it; there are no seasonal surcharges; and there is no fee to enrol.
The saving shows up in the holiday months. One White Mountain puzzle box measures about 0.15 cubic feet. A thousand of them in FBA from October to December cost about $360 a month to store. In AWD the same thousand cost $72 to $85 a month, plus about $210 to move them on to FBA and $1.40 for each carton handled in and out. For a seller who has to stock up months before a peak, that difference is the case for AWD.
And the peaks in our data are steep. White Mountain Puzzles sold an estimated $1,526,950 on Amazon in December 2025 and $246,072 in May 2026. Mount Cleverest made 48% of its year's sales in November 2025, and about 1% in each spring month.
What MCF costs
Amazon's MCF rate card currently in force covers 15 October 2026 to 14 January 2027, the holiday peak. For standard three-day delivery, a one-unit order costs:
| Size and weight | MCF, one unit | With 3.5% surcharge | FBA peak, same item |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small standard, 4 oz or less | $7.53 | $7.79 | $2.62 to $3.87 before surcharge, by price |
| Large standard, 4 to 8 oz (the Mount Cleverest deck) | $7.98 | $8.26 | $4.36 |
| Large standard, 1 to 2 lb (the White Mountain puzzle) | $10.97 | $11.35 | $6.37 |
The fee per unit falls when an order has more units in it; for a four-unit order of the smallest items it is $3.83 a unit before the surcharge. Amazon's MCF page says new US fees take effect on 15 January 2027, and we have not seen the non-peak rates, so we do not quote them. MCF is the simplest way to sell on your own website from FBA stock. On these examples it costs nearly twice what the same shipment costs as an Amazon order.
What 3PLs publish, and what they don't
We looked for 3PL prices on each company's own pricing page, on 10 November 2026. Most do not publish them.
| 3PL | What its pricing page says |
|---|---|
| Simpl Fulfillment | A flat rate per order by weight, from $7 an order, covering up to three picks, packaging and postage. No setup, onboarding or standard receiving fee. A $750 monthly minimum. Storage is billed by small bin, large bin, shelf or pallet, but those rates are not on the page. |
| ShipBob | No rates. "All quotes are customized"; request a quote. |
| ShipMonk | Explains its fee types (storage, fulfilment, special projects, shipping) but gives no rates; request a proposal. |
| Red Stag Fulfillment | Says its pricing is entirely custom and it does not publish a standard rate card. It also says figures on other websites are not its official rates. |
| Fulfillrite | No rates; the pricing page is a custom-quote form. |
Plenty of websites publish "average" 3PL prices per order, per bin and per pallet. We could not trace those figures to a 3PL's own rate card, so we do not repeat them. To compare 3PLs, ask each for a quote on the same order profile: your units per order, weight, box size, monthly orders and how many pallets you hold.
The one published figure is still useful as a yardstick. Simpl's $7 an order includes postage, which FBA's and MCF's fees also do. A light single-item order costs $7.79 through MCF at the moment. So for small, light products, a 3PL and MCF can cost about the same per order. The minimum is what differs: at $750 a month, a 3PL charging $7 an order only works out at that rate from about 107 orders a month.
How the multi-channel businesses in our data fulfil
None of the 18 businesses we research names a 3PL anywhere we could find. What we can see, from Amazon's seller records, listing data and the companies' own pages:
- White Mountain Puzzles sells through FBA on Amazon, across a storefront of 501 listings. Amazon's referral and FBA fees take about 46% of each Amazon sale, and FBA alone about $6.02 a puzzle, because puzzles are bulky for their price. It also runs its own Shopify store, at the same $19.99 price, and a wholesale programme for shops with a minimum of one case of 12. How the store and wholesale orders are shipped is not in our research.
- Mount Cleverest sells its decks through FBA in the US, and also through a TikTok Shop in the UK and its own store. How the non-Amazon orders are shipped is not public; our model for its TikTok sales uses an assumed $3.50 a unit for postage. Its November peak is the kind of season AWD is priced for.
- KALOTOYS splits its fulfilment by product. Its busy boards go through FBA, at $5.52 to $6.13 a unit. Its personalised name puzzles are made to order and shipped by the seller, so they carry no FBA fee. In September 2026 those four name puzzles were about 51% of its Amazon revenue. One of the three seller accounts selling the brand does not use FBA at all, and the brand's Shopify store prints a fulfilment address in Garland, Texas. The founders said on Vietnam's Shark Tank in 2024 that shipping costs them 20 to 22% of revenue, a figure they gave themselves.
- Gamblin' Golf ships its current scratch-off golf game itself: the listing says "Ships from and sold by Gamblin Golf". Its earlier game went through FBA in 2023 and 2024.
- Restoration Games runs its own warehouse; it hired a warehouse manager in 2024. On Amazon it uses FBA, at a fee of $9.88 for its best-selling board game, which weighs about 10 lb in its box.
- Wet Noses uses FBA on Amazon, where the fee came to about 29% of revenue in September 2026. Since April 2024, Pet Food Experts has been its exclusive distributor to independent pet shops.
The pattern is FBA for Amazon orders and something else for the rest: the brand's own shipping, its own warehouse or a distributor. Products that cannot sit in a warehouse, like KALOTOYS' personalised puzzles, are shipped from where they are made. In the data we have, no business moved its Amazon orders out of FBA to a 3PL.
How to decide
- Start with where you sell. If almost every order comes from Amazon, FBA does the job and a 3PL adds a second warehouse to manage. If a meaningful share comes from your own site, TikTok Shop or retailers, price MCF against a 3PL quote.
- Look at your peak. If you stock up for November and December, price AWD's storage against FBA's $2.40 a cubic foot.
- Check the minimum. A 3PL's monthly minimum is a fixed cost. At low volume it can cost more per order than MCF's higher fee.
- Price the product, not the warehouse. Size and weight decide every one of these fees. A $6 FBA fee on a $20 puzzle is 30% of the price; a $4 fee on a $17 deck is 24%.
To see what fulfilment leaves on your own product, run it through the Amazon FBA calculator. For everything Amazon charges besides fulfilment, see how much Amazon takes from sellers.