A seller reaches out once or twice a month with the same question. “I ship 300 units a month, every prep center I call either ignores me or quotes me a minimum I can’t hit. Who actually wants small sellers?” I wrote this note for that seller. The short answer is: a few prep centers do, KL Productions is one of them, and here is exactly what to look for when you evaluate the shortlist.
The problem with the word “no minimums”
Every prep center website says “no minimums.” Read the invoice. There are four places a small seller gets quietly filtered out.
1. Monthly minimum spend floor. Some national shops require $275 to $399 per month minimum billing. If you ship 300 units you are easily $100 to $150 in actual prep cost and the shop simply bills you up to the floor. You paid for services you did not use.
2. Volume tier gates on the per-unit rate. The rate card says “$0.65 per unit at 5K units per month, $0.55 at 25K.” Smaller than 5K? Often there is no published rate. You get quoted a higher number, or no quote at all.
3. Per-shipment minimums. Some Oregon shops require 50 units per shipment, or $50 per invoice. If your shipments are lumpy (a common pattern for OA and small private label), you end up padding invoices or delaying shipments to hit the minimum.
4. Onboarding or signup fees. $99 to $500 up front, sometimes partially credited against a throughput commitment. If you walk away in the first 60 days because the fit is wrong, that fee is gone.
When you read the fine print for “no minimums,” check all four. If the prep center passes all four, they actually welcome small sellers.
What to ask a prep center when you ship under 1,000 units per month
Six questions. Each one takes sixty seconds to answer if the prep center is actually ready for you.
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What is your per-unit rate for my volume band? A good prep center will give you a specific number, not “we quote per-seller.” If they cannot give you a rate for 300 units per month, they are not set up for you.
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What is the effective monthly minimum in dollars? Including any subscription, onboarding, throughput commitment, or per-shipment floor.
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What is your receiving SLA and the remedy if you miss it? “We try to receive same day” is not an SLA. “24 hours from truck arrival, documented incident report if we miss” is.
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Do you charge for services I do not use in a month? If my volume drops, does my bill drop? Or do I owe a monthly floor regardless?
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What is your exit fee? If I pull my inventory after three months, what does it cost me on the way out? The right answer is zero.
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Who is my named point of contact? Will I talk to an account rep from an onboarding queue or will I have a direct email to someone who actually works at the shop? Small sellers especially need a human answer.
If the prep center cannot answer those six in a single reply, they are not the right fit for a small seller. Move on.
The Oregon shortlist for small sellers
Three kinds of Oregon prep centers take small sellers well.
The published-rate operator. A prep center that publishes a full rate card with volume tiers all the way down to “under 500 units per month.” You can read the price before you email anyone. This is the Oregon transparency wedge. About 25 percent of the regional market operates this way. KL Productions does.
The flat-rate small-shop. A prep center that quotes a single per-unit rate regardless of volume, includes most services in the rate, and welcomes $50 invoices. Simpler to evaluate, less flexibility. Good if you want “just make it easy.”
The specialty niche shop. OA-focused, wholesale-focused, or Brand Registry-focused. These sometimes have a lower per-unit rate because they have standardized on one prep workflow. If your SKUs fit, great. If you mix OA and private label, they often cannot handle both.
For most small sellers I recommend starting with a published-rate operator because the evaluation is faster. You can compare against two other shops in an afternoon instead of waiting three days for quote replies.
What KL Productions does for small sellers specifically
I am going to be direct about what we do and do not do, because the rest of this note earns its credibility only if this section is honest.
We do:
- Publish the full rate card on the pricing page. No gate, no email, no tier-dependent language.
- Welcome 300-units-per-month sellers at the same per-unit rate as 3,000-units-per-month sellers in the “under 5,000 monthly” tier ($0.65 per unit FNSKU labeling).
- No monthly minimum spend, no onboarding fee, no exit fee.
- Receive on a 24-hour SLA with a documented incident report if we miss.
- Answer every email from Trevor directly. No account-rep queue, no CRM routing.
We do not:
- Have the scale discount that MyFBAPrep or ShipBob can offer at 50,000-plus units per month. If you are a mid-market aggregator, we are not your shop yet.
- Offer DTC pick-and-pack as a primary service. Our DTC line exists but is not priced aggressively. You are better off with a DTC-first 3PL if DTC is your main channel.
- Do SOC 2 audit-required enterprise work. Our compliance stack is FDA registered, FSMA PCQI, DOT hazmat, OSHA forklift. Not SOC 2 yet.
If those three limits apply to you, we will tell you in the quote reply. Trevor’s words: “If we’re not the right shop, I’ll point you to someone who is.”
The cost side
At KL Productions, a small seller shipping 300 units per month with FNSKU labeling, poly bag, and occasional bundling lands in the $200 to $300 per month range. Storage for a couple of pallets runs another $44 to $88 per month. There is no minimum on top of that.
If 300 units are OA with lots of sticker removal, the effective per-unit rate is closer to $1.00 all-in because sticker removal is included at KL but the labor is real. Small sellers with heavy sticker work run slightly higher per-unit than published-tier private label. Fair for what it is.
Compare that to a California prep center: $0.55 per unit base plus 8.82 percent tax on supplies plus a monthly minimum floor of $200 to $400 at most shops. California sellers shipping 300 units per month often end up paying a higher effective cost than the published rate card suggests.
The one question small sellers always ask
“Will I get the same quality as the big sellers?”
Yes. The pack line does not know how big you are. Every unit goes through the same dual-scan, photo documentation, and QC review. The SLA is the same. The scorecard is the same.
What is different: if you are a small seller and a mistake happens, you will get a phone call from Trevor, not an automated case number. That is the scale-advantage for you, not against you.
How to start
Send a one-email request with three data points:
- How many units per month you ship to Amazon, roughly
- What services you need (FNSKU labeling, poly bag, bubble wrap, bundling, storage)
- What prep center you are using today or self-prepping
You will get a written quote back inside one business day with a rate card, an SLA preview, and a calendar link if we are a fit. If we are not, Trevor will tell you that directly and name a shop that might be.
This is Field Note 006 from the KL Productions floor. Small sellers welcome.
Trevor writes the Field Guide himself from the KL Productions floor. No ghostwriter, no definitional 101 content, no AI-smoothed marketing posts. If he did not work through it on the floor, it does not go out under his byline.