Fulfillment

Fulfillment covers everything between an order landing in a queue and a box leaving the building: pulling or printing the item, quality-checking it, packing it with any inserts, generating a label, and handing it to a carrier. Pricing usually breaks into a per-order pick fee (commonly $2-5), a per-item charge, and pass-through shipping cost, separate from whatever the decoration itself costs.

This is the invisible layer behind every merch store that looks like a real e-commerce operation but is actually a print shop's warehouse in the back. A band running 40 SKUs of DTG-printed tees through a storefront never touches a box; the fulfillment partner is doing the printing, the folding, the poly-bagging, and the label printing for every order that comes through.

Add up all three cost lines — pick fee, per-item fee, shipping — before setting a retail price, because landed cost per order is almost always higher than the decorated-garment cost alone. Ask what's bundled into a per-order fee; some shops include poly-bagging and inserts, others charge extra for each.

The mistake we catch most often: a seller prices a shirt off the wholesale decorated cost and forgets fulfillment fees entirely, then wonders why a $22 tee nets almost nothing after a $4 pick fee, a $6 shipping charge, and payment processing on top.