Bigblue (UK) invoice audit

Bigblue's UK operation runs from a single warehouse at Thrapston, Kettering (7,800 m²), and its UK billing has a shape no US 3PL on this site uses: three separate money layers, each checked differently. On top sits a published App subscription, priced in pounds on the pricing page. Underneath sits a single bundled fulfilment fee — it covers warehouse reception, storage, picking, packing, shipping boxes and transportation together — which is never published per order; it is set in your contract's Special Clauses and discounted as volume grows, and Bigblue quotes it for brands shipping 500+ orders a month. Woven through both are published per-order "experience pack" prices, and a set of UK transport offers, each with its own code (bigblue-uk-standard, Bigblue-uk-express), its own parcel limits and its own short surcharge list. Bigblue's General Terms then add the machinery: a minimum fee for every billing period, invoices twice a month by default, direct debit five days after issue, and a six-week deadline after which an invoice is deemed accepted.

This page covers the UK only: UK warehouse, UK billing, UK transport offers. Bigblue's French, Spanish, Italian and German warehouses bill under the same framework but different offers, and are not covered here.

What Bigblue publishes, and what it does not

From Bigblue's pricing page, its help centre's UK billing table and UK transport-offer articles, and its published General Terms and Conditions, as published when we checked in November 2026.

• Published: the App subscription in GBP, the three experience-pack rates per plan, the surcharges on the UK domestic transport offers, a flat £50 penalty for non-conforming inbound deliveries, and the UK peak-surcharge table for the 2026 season.
• Not published: the fulfilment fee itself (per order), the per-cubic-metre storage rate, the amount of the per-period minimum fee, heterogeneous-reception and "special operations" rates, and the cost of warehouse barcoding. All of those are defined in the Special Clauses of your Service Agreement. The checks below split accordingly: published figures are checked to the penny; contract figures are checked for structure, triggers and double-charging.
• Plan fees are billed based on your main country of operation; the experience packs are billed based on the warehouse that ships the order. A UK brand whose orders ship from Thrapston should see GBP plan fees and GBP pack rates throughout.
• Storage is not billed by the pallet. Bigblue measures each product on arrival (length × width × height), multiplies by units held, counts the volume daily, and bills per cubic metre pro-rated by the day, at a per-m³ rate that rises the longer the stock has been stored. Your stored volume is visible live in the Bigblue App.

Charge	Bigblue's published UK price
App subscription — Starter	£49/month, or £40/month on a 3-year commitment
App subscription — Bigblue plan	£149/month, or £124/month on a 3-year commitment
App subscription — Advanced	Custom offer; £300/month on a 3-year commitment
Conversion pack (Fast Tags / checkout ETAs)	£0.49 per order (Starter) · £0.39 (Bigblue) · £0.35 (Advanced)
Delivery pack (branded tracking emails and page)	£0.25 per order (Starter) · £0.20 (Bigblue) · £0.16 (Advanced)
Returns pack (self-service returns portal)	£1.50 per return (Starter) · £1.20 (Bigblue) · £1.00 (Advanced)
Fulfilment fee (reception, storage, picking, packing, boxes, transport)	Not published — set in your Special Clauses; volume discounts apply
Storage	Per m³, counted daily, rate rises with stock age; rate set per contract
Minimum fee per billing period	Exists per the General Terms; amount in your Special Clauses
Non-conforming inbound delivery penalty	Flat £50 per handling of a listed irregularity
UK Standard / Express: sales-order under- or mis-declared admin charge	£1.10 per item
UK Standard / Express: oversize parcel	£11 per parcel
UK Standard: undeliverable return	£2.30 per parcel
UK Express: undeliverable return	£3.10 per parcel
UK Express Letter: oversize letter / overweight letter	£2.75 each; £5.50 if both

The plan tiers also carry the entitlements that define them — Starter includes 2 basic integrations and 2 users, the Bigblue plan adds bundles and custom unboxing with 1 premium integration and 5 users, Advanced is the omnichannel tier with 3 basic and 2 premium integrations and 15 users — which is what makes check 1 possible.

Checks that follow from Bigblue's own fee rules

1. Your subscription tier is checkable against the entitlements you actually use. The published GBP ladder is £49/£149 a month (£40/£124 on a three-year commitment; Advanced £300 on that commitment). If you are billed the Bigblue plan while your account runs two basic integrations and two users, you are paying for a tier above the one the pricing page describes for that usage — and if you signed the three-year commitment, the lower rate should appear from the first invoice, not after you ask.

2. Packs are billed by the shipping warehouse, at your plan's rate, and only for what they measure. Conversion and Delivery are per order; Returns is per return, not per order. A UK-shipped order on the Bigblue plan should carry £0.39 Conversion and £0.20 Delivery — not the Starter rates, and not a euro figure converted. Count them independently: Delivery-pack lines should equal orders shipped, Returns-pack lines should equal returns processed through the portal. A Returns-pack charge on an order that was never returned, or pack charges dated before you enabled the pack, are not charges the pricing page describes — the packs are sold as optional.

3. The minimum fee is a floor, not an extra line. Under clause 5.1 of the General Terms, if the services performed in a billing period exceed the minimum fee, you pay the services total "without application of the minimum fee." So in any period where a minimum-fee line and a full services total both appear, one of them is wrong. The trap period is the quiet half-month: Bigblue's default billing periods end on the 15th and on the last day of the month, so the minimum can bite twice a month, not once.

4. Twice-monthly periods create a duplication seam. With invoices issued for the periods ending on the 15th and at month-end (and invoicing no more than seven working days after each period ends), the same order, return or storage day can surface in two consecutive invoices when activity straddles a boundary. Rebuild each period from the invoice CSV downloads — Bigblue provides a detailed CSV and a PDF for every invoice in Settings > Billing, viewable by country — and check that order and return identifiers appear in exactly one period each. If you are on the Advanced plan, the Billing Insights dashboard (total invoice amount by service; fulfilment cost by channel, shop, country and shipping method; storage, returns and customisation costs; refund and compensation amounts) gives you Bigblue's own totals to reconcile against.

5. Storage: audit the inputs, because the calculation itself is contractually closed. The General Terms state that Bigblue's calculation of the storage cost "cannot be disputed" — but the calculation runs on inputs you can verify in the App, where stored m³ by product and age is shown in real time. Recompute from your own product dimensions: measured length × width × height × units held, day by day. A wrong dimension recorded at reception inflates every day that follows, and the ageing rate means slow stock should move into a higher rate band on the contract's schedule, not before it. Partial periods are pro-rated by the day; a full month's storage for stock that left mid-month contradicts Bigblue's own published method. If a dimension is wrong, the request is a re-measure, not a recalculation.

6. UK smart offers are invoiced on real weight — volumetric billing on them is the wrong basis. Both the UK Standard offer (bigblue-uk-standard, 2 working days) and the UK Express offer (Bigblue-uk-express, next working day) state "The real weight is used for invoicing," with a maximum parcel weight of 20 kg and maximum dimensions of 61 × 46 × 46 cm. The General Terms' general rule — shipping defined by actual or volumetric weight — gives way to the offer's own terms here. A UK domestic parcel repriced on volumetric weight, or an oversize charge on a parcel within 61 × 46 × 46 cm, does not match the offer it was shipped on. Note the undeliverable-return fee also differs by offer: £2.30 on Standard, £3.10 on Express. The same event billed at the other offer's price is a coding error, and the £1.10 mis-declared charge applies per item only where the items differ from what was declared.

7. The Express guarantee is a reimbursement promise with published conditions — claim the misses that qualify. On the UK Express offer, delivery is guaranteed in one working day and Bigblue states that if the time is not respected, the order fulfilment costs are reimbursed. The conditions are equally published: the order must be placed before 12:50pm with an auto-fulfil delay of no more than 5 minutes (later cut-offs apply as the delay setting rises), a long list of postcode areas (AB, BT, IV, HS, PA, PH, GY, JE, IM, ZE and others) is estimated at 2 working days and not guaranteed, and there is no reimbursement where the buyer caused the delay (address change, incorrect address, pickup requested) or in force majeure. So the check is mechanical: take the period's Express orders, remove the excluded postcodes and the buyer-caused failures, and every remaining late delivery should show a fulfilment-cost reimbursement. The letter offer is narrower still: 1 kg and 353 × 250 × 25 mm maximums, with £2.75 for oversize, £2.75 for overweight and £5.50 for both.

8. Peak surcharges have a window, a service list and, for UPS, a Bigblue discount. Bigblue's published Peak 2026 table for shipping from Great Britain runs the domestic smart offers from 2 November 2026 to 10 January 2027 — Standard Letter £0.10 per package, Express Letter and Standard £0.15, Express £0.22, with Royal Mail and Amazon Shipping at their own listed rates — and Starlinks cross-border services on their own dates and destination rates. Three checks follow: no peak line outside its window; no peak line on a service the table does not list; and on UPS services (domestic £0.48 per package, 20 September 2026 to 6 February 2027), Bigblue states that it applies a 75% discount to the UPS surcharges — the amount billed should be the discounted figure, and the UPS Demand Surcharges for Additional Handling (£7.25), Large Package (£68.95) and Over Maximum Limits (£439.90) should appear only on shipments that actually required additional handling or breached the size limits.

9. The £50 inbound penalty has a closed list of triggers — and UK pallets are not EUR pallets. Bigblue's reception policy applies a flat £50 penalty for handling a defined set of irregularities: products without barcodes or with non-compliant barcodes, products arriving before the inbound shipment was created in the app, no delivery note, barcodes differing from those in the app, and products received that do not appear in the inbound shipment. A £50 line for anything else — or two penalties for one irregularity — is outside the policy. Beyond the flat penalty, heterogeneous receipts (mixed SKUs, or mixed lot codes/expiry dates in one parcel) and non-compliant deliveries are charged at the "special operations" rate in your contract, and reconditioning is chargeable when pallets breach the warehouse standard — which for the UK warehouse is 120 × 100 cm UK pallets only; EUR pallets are expressly not accepted there. Check any reconditioning charge against your contract's special-operations rate and the pallet you actually sent.

10. A return can legitimately generate three charges — from three different documents. Do not merge them. The transport back to the warehouse is invoiced as a Return Shipment service; the warehouse handling — quality analysis and restocking — is invoiced as a Return Service, and the General Terms state that each product returned to the warehouse is invoiced for it; the Returns experience pack (£1.50/£1.20/£1.00 by plan) is the portal layer on the pricing page. An audit that treats the pack price as the handling fee, or the handling fee as duplication of the pack, will misjudge the invoice in both directions. Check each line against its own basis: return transport events, returned products, and portal returns respectively, and watch for the undeliverable-return fees in check 6 being charged as well as, rather than instead of, a return shipment on the same parcel.

11. Two smaller published charges catch people out. If Bigblue collects a shipment using a carrier relationship managed by you or a third party, the General Terms set a flat fee of twenty euros (€20), excluding tax, per shipment — including from the United Kingdom warehouse — so expect a euro-denominated line inside a GBP billing relationship, and check it only appears on collections you arranged. And a physical inventory carried out at your written request is charged at an hourly rate, on 14 working days' notice; an inventory charge with no request from you behind it has no basis in the Terms.

Raising a wrong charge with Bigblue

Clause 5.8 of the General Terms sets a hard procedure. You must inform Bigblue in writing, with the reason for the dispute, within six weeks of the invoice being issued; after that the invoice is deemed accepted and any complaint is inadmissible. While a dispute runs, you must pay the undisputed amount — no claim entitles you to defer, reduce or refuse payment of the invoices presented, which matters because payment is taken by direct debit from the fifth day after the invoice date. A justified complaint gives a right to a refund, paid within 15 days after Bigblue notifies you in writing that it agrees to it. Rate changes follow a different clock: Bigblue must notify a revision of the Special Clauses rates in writing, the new price takes effect 15 days after notification, and you may reject it and terminate by letter with acknowledgement of receipt within that same 15 days, with termination effective 48 hours after Bigblue receives the letter. Keep those two clocks separate — the six-week window is for errors on invoices already issued; the 15-day window is your only exit from a price rise before it applies.

UK merchants also carry a tax layer that is not Bigblue's: under clause 6.7 of the Terms, Bigblue is registered under the UK Fulfilment House Due Diligence Scheme (FHDDS), and customers storing goods for sale in the UK must register for and account for UK VAT, pay import VAT and customs duties, keep the records HMRC requires, and keep their VAT and EORI numbers recorded and up to date in the Bigblue app. Bigblue states expressly that it is not responsible for assessing, collecting or remitting taxes or duties on your behalf — so a customs or VAT amount on or around a Bigblue invoice is yours to verify against your own registrations, not a Bigblue charge to dispute with Bigblue.

Have us check it

Download the invoice PDFs and the detailed CSVs from Settings > Billing in the Bigblue app, and upload those plus your Service Agreement's Special Clauses and the plan you are on. We check the published layer to the penny — subscription tier, pack rates and counts, UK offer surcharges, peak windows, the £50 inbound penalties — and the contract layer for structure: minimum-fee application, storage inputs and ageing bands, duplicate lines across the twice-monthly periods, and Express-guarantee reimbursements that never appeared. Then we write the dispute, inside the six-week window, for the amounts the checks prove. The first audit is free.

Feeproof is not affiliated with Bigblue.

To: Bigblue (UK) Billing & Account Management
Subject: Formal Billing Dispute – Invoice #[INVOICE_NUMBER] – [MERCHANT_NAME]
Date: [TODAY_DATE]

Dear Bigblue (UK) Billing Department,

Upon line-by-line reconciliation of invoice #[INVOICE_NUMBER] against our executed Master Services Agreement (MSA) and confirmed Rate Schedule dated [CONTRACT_DATE], we have identified [COUNT] billing discrepancies totaling $[TOTAL_OVERCHARGE_AMOUNT].

Summary of audited discrepancies:
1. [Line/Ref ID]: Billed [Rate/Service] at $[BILLED_RATE]. Agreed contract tier is $[CONTRACT_RATE]. Variance: $[OVERCHARGE_AMOUNT]. (Ref: Contract Section [SECTION_NUM])
2. [Line/Ref ID]: Unauthorized accessorial surcharge [NAME] of $[SURCHARGE_AMOUNT] billed without prerequisite contract triggers.
3. [Line/Ref ID]: Dimensional weight (DIM) billed at [BILLED_WEIGHT] lbs vs verified packaging volume of [ACTUAL_WEIGHT] lbs. Variance: $[DIM_OVERCHARGE].

Per our agreement, this dispute notification is formally submitted within the contractual dispute window. 

Please confirm receipt and apply a credit memo of $[TOTAL_OVERCHARGE_AMOUNT] to our account, or provide a revised invoice within 10 business days.

Sincerely,
[YOUR_NAME]
[MERCHANT_NAME]
[ACCOUNT_NUMBER / MERCHANT_ID]