Storage and warehousing costs: cutting your logistics expenses
Rent, handling and tied-up capital eat away 8 to 15% of revenue. Five concrete levers can cut these costs without losing responsiveness.
- A stock audit often reveals 15 to 25% of SKUs that never sell
- Vertical racking can multiply capacity per square meter by 2 to 3
- Outsourcing logistics becomes profitable from 800 to 1,000 parcels per day
Audit before you invest
Before negotiating a lease or cutting headcount, rank your SKUs by annual turnover: those sold fewer than 2 times a year are candidates for quick clearance, often 15 to 25% of the catalog.
Also adjust your stock volumes to real seasonality rather than maintaining a uniform level all year round.
Optimize the existing space
Reorganize along the 80/20 logic: best-selling products close to shipping. Well-suited vertical racking often multiplies the storage capacity of the same floor space by 2 to 3.
Packaging sized to the product's actual dimensions also frees up 10 to 15% of storage volume for consumables.
Reduce tied-up capital with better forecasting
Split your products into fast, medium and slow movers, and adapt the replenishment frequency to each class: many e-merchants cut their total stock by 20 to 30% this way while lowering their stockout rate.
Every euro of stock you cut is a euro immediately reinjected into your cash flow.
Pool, outsource, monitor
Batch picking and consolidating small parcels reduce handling and shipping costs by 20 to 35%. Beyond 800 to 1,000 parcels per day, an external logistics provider often becomes cheaper than doing it in-house.
Set up a monthly dashboard (cost per parcel, turnover, stockout rate) to keep excess costs from creeping back after a one-off optimization.
Optimizing your logistics is part of our e-commerce support.