Should you keep fulfilment in-house or hand it to a 3PL? It's one of the most consequential calls an ecommerce brand makes. Here's an honest comparison.

In-house fulfilment

The upside is control: no per-order fee, and hands-on knowledge of how your product ships. That's great when you're just starting and volumes are low. The downside is that it doesn't scale. Packing eats time you should spend growing, you carry the cost of space, staff and equipment, and you're personally the bottleneck at peak. It also ties you to one location and your own carrier rates.

3PL fulfilment

The upside is that you get your time back, ship faster from a professional warehouse, access discounted carrier rates, and scale up and down without hiring. A Sydney 3PL like Sendi also puts you close to most of your customers. The trade-off is a per-order cost — though often lower than the true cost of DIY once you value your time — and handing over some day-to-day control, which is why choosing a partner with local, reachable support matters.

Which should you choose?

If you're at very low volume and just starting, in-house is usually fine. Once you're growing and packing is eating your week — around 200 or more orders a month — a 3PL almost always wins on both cost and sanity. The tipping point for most brands is when fulfilment stops being a task and becomes a job. If you're there, get a free quote from Sendi and compare your real cost per order against doing it yourself.