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3PL Quote
Normalizer Kit

Enter your order profile once. Enter up to five competing rate cards. Get true all-in cost per order for each vendor at your actual volume, a twelve-month projection with seasonality, and whether that ranking holds as your volume changes.

$99 one-time purchase
30-day money-back guarantee
Get the Kit — $99 →

Using this on client work? The $99 licence already covers that, and you can hand a client the output. The Agency licence at $299 covers everyone at your firm and lets you hand over the workbook itself.

Agency licence — $299 →
Excel .xlsx · 14 tabs · formulas only, no macros · version v1.0.9, updated 2026-08-18
comparison tabthe actual file
Comparison tab of the workbook showing four vendors priced on the same 2,000 orders a month: Fulfyld $8.32, ShipCalm $4.33, Walmart WFS $6.05 and Amazon MCF $9.32 per order, with a comparability row flagging that one excludes postage and one has not priced returns.
Four published rate cards, priced against the same 2,000 orders a month. The cheapest one is the only one that excludes postage, which is exactly the comparison a headline rate hides.
true cost per order $4.33–9.32 four published rate cards · same 2,000-order profile
margin kept today

What it does

The reason quotes cannot be compared is structural, not arithmetic. Vendors slice identical work into different line items: per-order versus first-item-plus-additional picking, storage per bin versus per cubic foot versus per pallet, software billed weekly or buried in the pick fee, shipping marked up invisibly. The workbook rebuilds every quote against one order profile and reports a single comparable number, then shows you which line items are actually driving the difference.

What is inside

01The normalizer workbookOrder profile in, all-in cost per order per vendor out, for up to five vendors.
02Twelve-month projectionSeasonal volume and peak storage handled separately.
03Breakeven chartCost per order swept across a range of monthly volumes, so you can see whether your ranking is stable or has a crossover hidden in it.
043PL RFP template11 questions that force vendors to quote the line items they normally leave out.
0540-point red-flag checklistBuilt from the clause research behind our contract guide.
06Benchmark tabDrawn from our public dataset — 238 sourced rows across 13 vendors, each with its own source URL, every row verified 2026-08-04 or later — so you can see where a quote sits.

What you actually get

These are screenshots of the file itself, not mockups. The numbers in them are the four published rate cards our own worked example uses, so you can check every one against the guide before you spend anything.

Here is what it is worth. On that example, pricing a year by taking one month and multiplying by twelve gives $199,704 for the first vendor. The actual twelve months, with peak volume, peak storage and the January returns wave, come to $233,128. The shortcut is $33,424 light on one vendor, and it is light by a different amount on each of the others, which is how a shortcut quietly reorders a ranking. That is the mistake $99 is against.

Twelve-month projection tab showing each month's orders, cubic feet, peak flag and returns, with annual totals per vendor and a final row reading how much the flat-month shortcut understates the year: 16.7%, 15.9%, 19.5% and 18.1%.
Twelve months, not one multiplied by twelve. The bottom row is the size of that error per vendor: 15.9% to 19.5% on this example.
A vendor rate card tab for Walmart WFS, showing the source URL, the date the card was read, a notes box recording scope limits and the tripling of peak storage, and the handling, postage and storage input sections.
One tab per vendor, each carrying the source URL, the date the card was read, and what could not be resolved from it. The note here records that WFS fulfils Walmart marketplace orders only, so it is not a substitute for a DTC 3PL, and that its peak storage is triple the base rate, which is why this vendor gets more expensive in Q4 while others get cheaper. The per-order grid reads zero on purpose: WFS prices purely per unit, and that $3.45 sits one section down.

Who it is for

Operators running 500 to 20,000 orders a month who are choosing a 3PL, renegotiating with their current one, or building the case to leave. If you have one quote and no comparison, the workbook will not manufacture leverage you do not have. If you have three, it will tell you which one is actually cheapest at your volume, which is rarely the one with the lowest headline pick fee.

Try the method first

The full normalization method is published free, with worked examples against real rate cards: How to compare 3PL quotes apples to apples. The Kit automates it. If you would rather build it yourself from the guide, that is a legitimate outcome and the guide is written to make it possible.

It handles marketplaces too, not only 3PLs. Walmart WFS and Amazon MCF price per unit by weight tier while a 3PL prices per order, and usually only one of the two includes the label — which is exactly the mismatch the workbook exists to remove. The worked example ships with Walmart WFS priced against three 3PLs on the same order profile, so if you are deciding whether to stay on WFS or move, that comparison is already built.

$99, once. Against a 3PL contract worth thousands a month.

One payment, yours to keep. Run it against every quote you get, this year and next.

Get the Kit — $99 →
one-time · 30-day money-back guarantee

Would rather not do it at all? Send us the quotes and we will run this for you and write up the answer — the quote audit, $500 flat.

Excel .xlsx, 14 tabs, formulas only, so nothing here can run code on your machine. Verified in Google Sheets — it imports with no warning and the formulas stay live. Also opens in Apple Numbers and LibreOffice. Version v1.0.9, updated 2026-08-18.

30-day money-back guarantee, no questions — see the refund policy. Find an error in a rate or a formula and it gets published at corrections, and buyers get the corrected file: data@ratecardlab.com.

Not buying today?

The dataset behind the Kit is free and we keep re-checking it. Leave an address and you get an email when a vendor moves a published rate, a company is added, or the Kit itself is updated — nothing else, and nothing on a schedule. To come off, email data@ratecardlab.com and we delete the record.