Per-unit prep pricing shows you one of the three numbers that make up your inbound cost. Placement fees and freight sit on separate invoices, so they never enter the comparison. This worksheet rolls all three into one honest number, annualizes your placement fee exposure, and puts your dock-to-receipt speed next to it.
Six months is the window that balances signal against effort, and it is the export Seller Central gives you cleanly. US-destined shipments only. Exclude CA and MX.
Have a quote in hand from a consolidation or cross-dock program? Enter it here and the results panel will judge it against your current blended rate.
Annualizing assumes your six months are representative. Adjust for seasonality if they are not. Your placement fee run rate is a strategy decision being made by default: lever 5 below is where to change it.
Industry-standard inbound check-in runs 7 to 43 days. ZonPrep's maximum prep SLA is 72 hours from dock to prepped, labeled and shipment plan created, 365 days a year. Average inbound check-in at Amazon is 24 to 48 hours from when shipments leave our facility.
Enter a quoted per-pallet rate in step 3 to compare it against your current blended rate.
Nothing you enter here leaves your browser. The calculation runs on this page and is not sent anywhere or stored. The figures loaded by default are illustrative placeholders, not a customer's numbers. Replace them with yours.
No black box. Every number on this page comes from one of the following, so you can rebuild it in your own spreadsheet and check our arithmetic.
Two assumptions worth naming. Annualizing by doubling treats your six months as representative, so adjust it yourself if your volume is seasonal. And if part of your volume ships SPD rather than palletized, the per-pallet rate is only as good as the pallet-equivalent you estimated: roughly 40 to 50 cartons of small-to-midsize product per pallet. Write your assumption down next to the result, because it is the first thing anyone will question.
Judge every inbound alternative against it. Not against a freight quote in isolation, and not against a per-unit prep rate. Those each show one slice of the cost. The blended rate is the whole invoice stack divided by the pallets that moved.
Placement fees respond to how you ship: shipment count, split behavior, and boxes per SKU. If the annualized figure surprises you, that is the line to work on first, and lever 5 is where to start.
Every extra day from dock to receipt delays Prime eligibility, which pushes your replenishment cadence, your weeks-of-cover targets, your production runs, and your out-of-stock risk. Cost and time belong on the same page.
This is a sequence, not a menu. Each one makes the next cheaper to pull. Fix the rhythm before you chase the rate.