UK prep pricing is more transparent than it used to be - several centres now publish full tiered rate cards. Here is what the numbers actually look like, and where the extras hide.
The headline per-unit range
Standard prep - receive, inspect, FNSKU label, ship - runs from about £0.10 to £0.60 per unit across the centres listed here. Where you land depends almost entirely on monthly volume.
At the low end, Prep Center Direct publishes plans from £0.10 per unit, and Fast Prep Center UK quotes £0.13 per unit at 2,000+ units a month. Ascend FBA's enterprise tier is £0.24. In the middle, FN Prep runs £0.30 to £0.40 depending on tier, and Blue30 starts at £0.25. At the upper end, Prep365 starts at £0.60 for the smallest tier and falls to £0.40 above 5,000 units, while Prep Online charges a flat £0.60 including the review step.
The pattern is consistent: roughly £0.40-£0.60 per unit if you are shipping a few hundred units a month, roughly £0.25-£0.35 in the low thousands, and £0.10-£0.25 once you are into serious volume.
The extras that change the answer
Poly bagging is the most common add-on and is quoted separately almost everywhere - Ascend FBA, for example, charges £0.15 to £0.24 per bag on top of the prep rate. Bundling multipacks costs more again, because it is assembly work.
Storage is the second big one, and the pricing model varies wildly. Blue30 charges from £0.36 per cubic metre per day; Ascend FBA charges £0.95 to £1.50 per pallet. If you drip-feed stock into Amazon to avoid their long-term storage fees, you are paying someone to hold it, and that cost belongs in the comparison.
Then there is forwarding. Box or pallet forwarding into Amazon is often a flat fee - £1.50 a box at Ascend FBA, from £55 a pallet at Blue30. Removal order handling, returns grading and container unloading are all typically extra too.
How to compare quotes honestly
Take a real month of your own volume and price it end to end at each centre: units prepped, bags used, pallets stored, shipments forwarded. A centre with a cheap prep rate and expensive storage can easily cost more than one with the reverse, and you will not see that from the headline number.
Ask specifically whether there are setup fees, monthly minimums or subscription charges. Several UK centres - Fast Prep, TheFbaPrep, Prep Centre UK, UK Prep Center - advertise none of these, which materially helps sellers whose volume moves month to month.
Finally, factor shipping. A centre closer to the Amazon fulfilment centres you actually send to will cut your carrier costs, and that saving can outweigh a penny or two on the prep rate.
Compare UK prep centres
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