E-Commerce Warehouse Requirements: The 2026 Acceptance Specification

An e-commerce warehouse has to provide three things a general godown does not: an address for every unit, a floor and a vehicle face that can clear a courier cut-off twice a day, and records that can prove a stock position on demand. E-commerce and retail warehousing at Lozy is specified against those three, on a starting basis of ₹21 per sq ft per month in Delhi NCR, with the managed e-commerce plan from ₹4,999 per month. What follows is the specification itself - the minimums to put in a requirement sheet, and the test to run on each one before you sign.

Key takeaways

• A workable facility needs roughly 6 m of clear height under the lowest obstruction, a floor rated for about 3 tonnes per square metre and two vehicles at the face at once. Below that you are renting a room with a shutter, whatever the racking plan says.
• Space is quoted from ₹21 per sq ft per month; the managed e-commerce plan starts at ₹4,999 per month, an inventory-led plan at ₹4,499, a seasonal booking at ₹1,299 and short-term storage at ₹699 - billed monthly on a GST invoice with no long lock-in.
• The acceptance table below carries 12 requirements. Each row gives the minimum, the test to run on the visit and the reason this trade, specifically, cares - and three failed rows is a walk-away, not a negotiation.
• Records are the deliverable, not the paperwork around it: one bin location per SKU, stock-on-hand counted daily for fast lines, a movement log per pick, returns graded weekly and a full reconciliation monthly.

Most enquiries in this trade are written the wrong way round: a city, an area, a budget, and whatever comes back is judged on rent, distance and how the photographs look. The requirements that decide whether a catalogue can actually ship surface in week three, after the stock has moved in.

A requirement sheet inverts that - one page of numbers, each with a test attached, scored across two or three buildings. It takes an afternoon to write and an hour per site to run. The e-commerce and retail warehousing service is built to be measured this way, and whether you need a fulfilment centre or a warehouse at all is settled separately in the fulfilment centre vs warehouse guide. The operational side - how an order moves and what the bill is built from - is the warehousing for e-commerce brands guide.

What an e-commerce warehouse has to provide, and why each part is non-negotiable

Four capabilities decide whether a building can run a catalogue, and a building that cannot carry all four is the wrong building however attractive the rent: addressable storage, an assembly floor, a vehicle face sized to the courier sweep, and a stock record that answers a question on one screen. Everything else - the paint, the office, the parking - is preference.

Addressable storage

Addressable means every unit sits at a position with a name: aisle, rack, level, slot. Not a section, not a corner, not "the shelf by the shutter". The test is slightly brutal - ask the facility where one specific SKU is, walk there, and put a hand on it. If the answer needs a call to somebody who is not on site, the storage is not addressable; it is remembered, and memory does not scale past a few hundred lines.

This matters more here than anywhere else because of the ratio of picks to pallets. A catalogue of 600 SKUs shipping 180 orders a day generates over 400 order lines, and each line is a walk to a position. Where positions exist the walk is planned; where they do not, every line becomes a search - invisible in the invoice, very visible at the cut-off.

An assembly floor, not just a stacking floor

Packing needs horizontal surface that is not storage: a bench per packer, staging for packed parcels waiting on the manifest, space for packaging material, and clear floor in front of the bench for a trolley to turn. A building can be 90% racked and still be unusable if the remaining tenth is a corridor. Plan the packing and staging zone at roughly a fifth of the footprint for an operation in the low hundreds of orders a day, and do not accept a layout that borrows it back during peak.

A vehicle face sized to the sweep

Two things arrive and they are not the same vehicle. Inbound comes on a truck or a 32-foot container at a frequency you control. Outbound goes on courier tempos and vans, twice a day, at times the courier decides. A facility with one narrow shutter that suits the inbound truck queues the outbound sweep every evening, and a queued sweep is a missed scan, which is a late delivery, which is a review.

A record that answers a question in one screen

The fourth requirement is the one most often waved through. Ask what the facility can show you, in writing, about stock: how many units of this SKU, at which position, moved when, by whom, against which order. Then ask whether that view exports as a file you can open. A facility holding a good record it will not export is holding your inventory hostage to a conversation.

The acceptance specification: 12 requirements, their minimums and how to test them

This is the table to attach to a requirement sheet or take on a visit. Read it as a drafting benchmark to agree in writing, not as a substitute for a structural, fire or engineer's certificate - each of those is a separate document, listed under licensing below. Score every row pass or fail, and treat three failures as a walk-away rather than a discount to negotiate.

If you would rather have the sheet run with you, the e-commerce and retail warehousing team will walk a shortlisted site against it and tell you which rows the building fails.

The physical envelope: floor, height, columns and the face

The envelope is the part you cannot change after signing. Racking can be added, a bench moved, a system replaced; a floor, a roof height and a column grid are the building. That is why four of the twelve rows are envelope rows, and why they are tested before anybody discusses rate.

The floor: load, flatness and dust

Floor load is quoted as a uniform distributed load, which misleads for racked storage because racking does not distribute. A pallet position carrying a tonne and a half transfers it through four feet onto a small area, so what matters is point-load capacity and reinforcement, not only the headline figure. Ask for the specification in writing. If the answer is a verbal "it takes anything", the building has no documentation and the row fails on that alone.

Flatness matters for a reason that surprises sellers: racking on an uneven slab sits out of plumb, loses capacity and eventually fails inspection. The visit test is cheap - a loaded pallet truck across the joints, a straight edge on the floor, and a look at how the existing racking sits.

Dust is the third part and the one buyers forget. A sealed floor sweeps clean in minutes; an unsealed one releases fines every time a truck crosses it, and those fines end up inside the cartons and in the photographs a buyer posts with a one-star review.

Height: measure to the obstruction, not the eaves

Every listing quotes a height, and it is usually the eaves. What racking can use is the distance from finished floor to the lowest thing in the way - truss chord, sprinkler head, light fitting. On a 9 m eaves building the usable number can easily be 6.5 m, and the gap to 4.5 m is two rack levels.

Measure at four corners and the centre, because roofs sag and floors fall to a drain. Take the lowest reading. Then check what the sprinkler layout allows: a rack reaching within a few hundred millimetres of a head fails a fire inspection, and the height above the flue space is not available.

Columns and the pick run

Racking runs in straight lines and columns interrupt straight lines. A 12 m by 24 m grid gives long runs and generous bays; a tighter 8 m grid gives short runs and wasted ends. On the layout drawing, mark the columns, draw the runs and count the pick faces. If the count falls below what the catalogue needs, the building is too small even when the square footage says otherwise - you are not buying square feet, you are buying positions.

The face: dock, apron and the second sweep

Test the vehicle face with the vehicle. A courier tempo is taller and wider than a car and must stand while it is loaded; a 32-foot container needs a turning circle many industrial lanes do not provide. Watch a real vehicle arrive, turn and leave. If none calls during your visit, ask what time the sweeps run and come back then - it is the most informative hour you can spend on a site.

Also check platform height against the vehicles that will call. A high-bed tempo and a low-floor van cannot both be served from one fixed platform without a leveller, and loading a van by hand twice a day is a back injury with a schedule.

Power, network and the systems the building has to carry

An e-commerce warehouse is a small data operation that happens to have a roof. Three services must stay up through a power cut - lighting over the pick face, the stock system and its network, and the label printers - and a building that cannot carry them is a shed with ambitions.

The three things that must stay up

Lighting first, because a torch-lit pick is a mis-pick. Second the network, which carries the stock system, the scan guns and the label printer - a router on a domestic connection is not a business service. Third the printing, because labels that do not print are parcels that do not leave. Ask what the backup covers, how it starts and who is called when it does not, then switch the mains off and time it. A speed test at the packing bench in a busy hour is the honest bandwidth number.

What the stock system has to be able to do

Ten capabilities separate a stock system from a spreadsheet, and a facility should be able to demonstrate most of them live:

• One location per SKU, with the location naming convention documented and stable.
• Stock-on-hand by SKU and position, refreshed through the day rather than at month end.
• A movement log per SKU - receipt, put-away, pick, pack, dispatch, return, adjustment - each with a user and a timestamp.
• Order import from a file or an integration, with an error report for lines it could not read.
• Serial or batch capture where the catalogue needs it: electronics, dated cosmetics, anything with a warranty.
• Returns receipt against the original order number, with a grade and a disposition.
• Cycle count scheduling, so a count is routine rather than an event.
• A named user for your account, with read access to your stock only.
• Export to CSV on demand, without a request to the operator.
• An audit trail that cannot be edited after the fact by the person who made the entry.

If a facility can show eight of those ten live, the operation is real. If it can show three and promises the rest, you are buying a roadmap.

The channel feed and the count

The count has to reach the places where it is sold. A marketplace panel, a D2C store and a counter reading three different numbers is the mechanism behind almost every oversell, and the warehouse is where the fix lives: one system of record, one count, published outward. Ask how often the feed is published and what happens when a channel goes down and orders arrive anyway. Where the catalogue must run as a count with a ledger behind it, that is the inventory warehousing basis at ₹4,499 per month.

Licences, registrations and the documents that have to exist before stock moves

There is no such thing as an e-commerce warehouse licence, and an operator who says otherwise is selling you something you do not need. What has to exist is a pair: the premises must show its statutory approvals, and the seller must hold its own registrations. Both are checked before the first carton, because both are difficult to retro-fit around live stock.

What the premises must be able to show

• Proof of lawful occupancy - a lease, a leave-and-licence agreement or an ownership document, in the name of the entity that invoices you.
• Fire certificate or NOC for these premises, current, with the address matching your agreement. This is the document most often produced expired, and the one an insurer reads first.
• Trade or municipal licence where the local body requires one for storage in that zone, plus confirmation that zoning permits warehousing at all.
• Structural confirmation for floor load and racking installation, and a racking inspection record where racking is already fitted.
• Goods insurance on the building, and a written answer on what covers your stock while it is inside - whose policy, what peril, what excess.
• GST tax invoice capability in the name of the entity you contracted with, not a rent receipt from an unregistered proprietorship.
• Power and backup documentation, so the generator is a maintained asset rather than a machine in the yard.

What the seller has to hold

The registration every seller needs before stock moves is GST, and for a warehouse the relevant step is adding the premises as an additional place of business rather than assuming the registered address covers it. The procedure is published on the GST portal, and your accountant should confirm how it applies to your entity's state and constitution. Beyond that:

• Shops and establishment registration under the state's own Act, where the state requires it of the business operating from the premises.
• Legal metrology registration as packer, importer or manufacturer where you sell pre-packaged goods, with the declarations - net quantity, MRP, packer details, consumer care - correct on the pack and on the listing.
• FSSAI licence if any part of the catalogue is food, including packaged snacks and beverages, and a premises that can meet the conditions attached to it.
• CDSCO registration if the catalogue includes cosmetics, medical devices or drugs. Those categories need a facility built for them, and a general e-commerce warehouse is not one.
• IEC from the DGFT if you import the stock you store.
• BIS registration for the electronics categories that carry a compulsory registration requirement, checked per product rather than per brand.
• Brand authorisation for marketplace listings - commercial rather than statutory, but asked for in the same conversation.
• Stock insurance in your own name, because the warehouse's policy covers the building and its own liability, not your inventory.

How to check it in ten minutes

Ask for the documents as a set and read three fields on each: entity name, premises address, expiry date. A certificate for a different address in the same industrial area is not a certificate for this building. Where storage is run to professional benchmarks, the practice the sector works to is described by the Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority - a useful reference for what a warehouse ought to be able to evidence even where registration does not apply to your arrangement.

None of this is a reason to delay a decision. It is a reason to put the document set inside the requirement sheet, so a site that cannot produce it is eliminated on paper rather than argued about later. Send us the document list you are working to and we will say which items a Lozy facility provides and which sit with you as the seller.

Record-keeping: what has to be written down, and how often

Eight records carry the operation, and each needs an owner, a format and a frequency. Records kept as a habit survive a busy week; records kept as an intention do not. The frequencies below are the working minimum.

What makes these records evidence rather than statements is separation of duty: the person who picks should not close the stock line, and the person who counts should not post the adjustment. Where one person does both the record still exists, but it stops being proof. Two derived numbers are worth tracking monthly - stock accuracy against the physical count, and the share of orders dispatched inside the cut-off. If accuracy falls while adherence holds, the fault is in receiving or put-away; if adherence falls while accuracy holds, it is in layout, labour or the sweep.

What moves the monthly figure in this trade

Six inputs move an e-commerce warehouse bill, and only one of them is the rate per square foot. The other five are what turn a quote into a budget, because two sellers with the same footprint can pay very different amounts for the same month.

• Bin density, not floor area. What you buy is positions. A catalogue of 600 SKUs at four units per bin needs 150 bins; at ten units per bin it needs 60. Deeper bins mean fewer positions and less walking, but more capital tied up per line.
• Order profile. Orders per day is the headline; lines per order is the cost driver. Four hundred orders at one line each is a different operation from two hundred at two and a half, even though the parcel count is similar.
• Returns rate. Every return is an inward receipt, an inspection, a grade and a disposition, consuming bench time without producing a dispatch. Quote the rate you actually run.
• Packaging and materials. Cartons, fill, tape and labels are consumables priced per parcel. A fragile or oversize catalogue consumes two or three times the material of a poly-bag category.
• The cut-off and shifts. One evening sweep fits one shift; a noon cut-off with a second sweep needs a second shift - a labour cost that appears nowhere in the rent.
• Term, footprint and location. Monthly billing keeps the commitment short; a longer term prices differently. And the same floorplate is not the same asset on the Gurugram side and on the Dadri side.

The published bases are these. Warehouse and godown space for rent starts at ₹21 per sq ft per month on the warehouse for rent page, which is the basis to price a floorplate against a pallet count. Racked or floor space held month by month follows the same starting basis on the business warehousing page. The managed e-commerce plan starts at ₹4,999 per month on the e-commerce warehousing service page, an inventory-led plan at ₹4,499 on inventory warehousing, a seasonal booking at ₹1,299 and short-term storage at ₹699. All are starting rates, billed monthly, invoiced with GST and carrying no long lock-in, and they sit together on the pricing page. How those bases add up over a month is worked through in the e-commerce brands guide.

Two comparisons are worth making before you negotiate. The first is between bases rather than numbers: ₹21 per sq ft and ₹4,999 per month measure different things, and comparing them directly always makes the wrong one look cheaper. The second is between months - a rate that looks high in February is often cheaper in October, because the freedom to add positions for six weeks and release them afterwards has a value a fixed lease never shows. For a single campaign there is on-demand warehouse space, and the cost per pallet guide sets out the per-position arithmetic if you want to normalise the two. If the alternative on the table is a full-service partner, the 3PL warehousing in Delhi NCR guide compares the two honestly.

The five ways e-commerce storage fails, and the row that would have caught each

Failures in this trade are rarely dramatic. They are specification gaps that become visible only under load, and each maps back to a row in the table above.

One: the face fits the landlord's van, not the courier's tempo

A shutter wide enough for a small truck, an apron that doubles as the car park, a lane the courier will not block because it is the public road. It works in the trial week and stops working in the first peak, when two tempos arrive together and one idles on the road while a third is loaded by hand. The row is the vehicle face, tested with the actual vehicle at the actual sweep time.

Two: racking sized to the bay rather than to the carton

Standard beams at a standard spacing, chosen because they were already in the building, holding cartons that fill two-thirds of the depth and leave a third of every level empty. The space is paid for and not used. Take your longest, widest and heaviest cartons to the site and put them on the beam. The rows are racking rating and bay depth - together they decide how much of the height you actually get.

Three: returns bolted on after the first month

The layout is drawn for outbound because outbound is what the seller pictured. Returns arrive in week three, are stacked wherever there is floor, and are sorted on a bench that is also the packing bench, so the packer stops packing every time a return is opened. The row is returns segregation: a marked lane, a grading bench and a written disposition rule, agreed before the first order ships rather than after the first RTO. The reverse logistics and returns guide takes the grading and disposition side further.

Four: records that exist but cannot leave the building

The facility keeps an excellent system and shows you a screen whenever you ask. What it will not do is give you a file. Month end arrives, your accountant asks for a stock statement, and the answer is a photograph of a screen. The row is bin-level stock system with export, and asking for the CSV takes ninety seconds and settles the question permanently.

Five: an approval that exists for a different address

A fire NOC for the landlord's other shed, a trade licence for the office at the front, a GST invoice raised by an entity that is not the one on the agreement. Each is a small administrative gap until there is a loss, a claim or an audit, at which point it becomes the reason nothing is paid. The row is fire safety; the licensing section is the rest of the same check.

The pattern across all five is the same: the failure was cheaper to prevent than to fix, and it was visible on the visit if anybody had known to look. That is the whole argument for carrying a written specification into a building instead of an impression, and it is how e-commerce and retail warehousing at Lozy is scoped. If the building is shared, the shared and multi-client warehouse guide covers what separation to insist on.

A worked example: a 600-SKU catalogue in 4,000 sq ft

Numbers make the specification concrete. Take a representative case rather than a customer: a home and kitchen seller running a D2C store and two marketplace listings, with 600 live SKUs, an average of 18 units on hand per SKU and about 180 orders a day averaging 2.4 lines each. That is roughly 10,800 units, which at six units to a carton is about 1,800 cartons, or a little over 80 cubic metres of packed stock - call it 58 pallets at a realistic stack.

Racked three levels high, 58 pallets need about 19 pallet positions, which at a 1.2 m pallet footprint and an aisle factor near 1.9 works out at about 44 sq m, or a little under 500 sq ft of racking. The pick face is the larger number: 600 SKUs across four shelf levels is 150 bin widths, and at half a metre each that is 75 metres of shelving - three double-sided runs of about 12.5 m. Add benches, staging for the evening sweep, the returns lane, packaging material and the aisles between, and the operation lands near 3,500 to 4,000 sq ft of usable floor.

At the starting basis of ₹21 per sq ft per month, 4,000 sq ft is about ₹84,000 a month before handling, which against 180 orders a day over 26 working days is roughly ₹18 of storage per order - easy to check against a per-order fee, hard to check against a rate quoted per square foot alone. The arithmetic is worth doing before the visit because it converts an argument about rent into an argument about positions, and positions are what a building actually supplies.

Now apply the specification. The building must carry 19 loaded pallet positions plus the bins, so floor load and racking rating come first. The 75 metres of shelving must run without a column through it, so the grid row decides whether the layout survives. Two shifts of picking and packing, plus the label printers, need the power row. And the returns lane - about 5% of 4,000 sq ft, so 200 sq ft - has to exist in the drawing before the first order ships.

Run the same arithmetic on your own catalogue before you look at a building: SKUs and units per SKU give the cartons, cartons give the pallets, pallets give the positions, positions and bins give the floor. Twenty minutes with a calculator is the difference between a requirement sheet and a wish list. The warehouse inspection checklist is the companion document for the visit, the e-commerce fulfilment centre guide covers the operation inside the building, and the marketplace seller guide covers a catalogue listed on three channels at once.

The handover process, from requirement to first dispatch

Nine steps take a requirement to a working operation, and the order matters more than the speed. The two that get skipped under time pressure - the written layout and the test intake - are the two that prevent the expensive surprises.

1. Write the requirement sheet. The twelve rows, your SKU count, order profile, returns rate and cut-off. One page, and the document every later conversation refers back to.
2. Request documents before visiting. Fire NOC, occupancy proof, structural confirmation, insurance, GST status of the invoicing entity. A site that cannot produce them does not need a visit.
3. Shortlist two or three buildings on the same side of the region, so the comparison is about the building and not the drive. The Gurgaon guide, the Faridabad guide and the Haryana corridor guide set out what sits where before you commit a day to visits.
4. Visit with a test kit. Laser measure, one carton of each extreme size, a trolley, a phone for the speed test, a torch for the corners, a printed copy of the table. Score on the spot.
5. Agree the layout in writing. Rack runs, bin naming, bench positions, staging, returns lane and inbound flow. A layout signed by both sides is the only version that survives the first busy week.
6. Set the operating rules. Cut-off time, sweep times, receiving windows, labelling standard, returns disposition and the escalation contact - in the agreement, not in an email.
7. Sign, then set up access. Your users on the stock system, your SKU master loaded, the channel feed tested with a dummy order that must be picked, packed and cancelled before it ships.
8. Run a test intake. One vehicle, one pallet, one SKU, received, binned, picked and dispatched under observation. Cheaper to find a fault with one pallet than with a container.
9. Measure the first week. Cut-off adherence, stock accuracy on the test SKUs, and order-import to label-print time. Three numbers on day seven: right means scale the intake, wrong means fix it before volume hides it.

The handover is also the moment to agree the exit: notice period, how stock is released, how long records are held after you leave and in what format. A facility that cannot answer the exit question on day one is planning to make it difficult on the day it matters.

If the catalogue is moving in over a weekend, send the requirement sheet on WhatsApp with a photograph of the layout drawing and we will mark it up before the vehicle is booked.

What to put in the agreement

An e-commerce warehouse agreement has eleven clauses that matter, and most disputes in this trade trace back to one of them being absent rather than to anybody acting in bad faith.

1. The footprint and the positions. Square feet alone is not a specification. Name the racked area, the bin count and the floor bay, and say what happens if the layout changes.
2. Handling rates, itemised. Per order, per line, per return, per put-away, and what each includes. An itemised rate is comparable; a bundled one is not.
3. The cut-off, as a service level. A time, a measurement and a consequence. "Same-day dispatch" without a stated cut-off is a marketing phrase.
4. Liability for stock. Who insures what, the excess on a claim, whether a loss is valued at cost or retail, and what evidence is needed.
5. Returns handling. Who opens, who grades, who decides disposition, how long a unit may sit before disposal, and who pays for disposal.
6. Records and export. Who owns the data, in what format it exports, how often a stock report is issued, and how long records are retained after exit.
7. Access rights. Your right to enter, audit and count, on what notice, and whether you may station your own staff during peak.
8. Price review and term. Notice period, how a rate change is communicated, and whether the plan renews monthly or for a fixed term.
9. The exit and stock release. Days to release stock after notice, the format of the final stock statement, and settlement of outstanding handling charges.
10. GST and invoicing. The entity that invoices, the GSTIN, the place of supply and the treatment of any exempt component. A rent receipt in place of a tax invoice is a cost, not a saving.
11. Co-stored goods. What else may be stored in the building, which categories are excluded, and what separation applies to your stock - the clause that matters most if you sell anything ingestible, flammable or high-value.

Read the agreement against the requirement sheet before signing. If a row in the table has become a promise in an email rather than a term in the document, it is a preference - and preferences are what get lost when the operator changes staff.

Where Lozy fits, and where we do not

Lozy runs 77+ warehouses and more than one million square feet of live space from a Delhi NCR base, with e-commerce and retail positions that can be measured against the twelve rows above, monthly billing with a GST invoice, and no long lock-in. The managed e-commerce plan starts at ₹4,999 per month and floorplate space at ₹21 per sq ft per month, and both can be checked against your own arithmetic before you commit. What is free right now is on the warehouse listing.

We are not the right answer for everything, and it is worth saying so plainly. There is no cold-room capability, no bonded warehouse and no calibrated testing here; a catalogue that needs any of those needs a specialist facility built for it, and we will say that rather than take the booking. Hazardous goods, pharma-grade storage and anything requiring a controlled-temperature guarantee sit outside what this network does.

If your requirement is on the right side of that line, email the requirement sheet to care@lozy.in and we will reply with the facilities that pass it, the positions available and the rate - usually within the working day.

Related guides

• warehousing for e-commerce brands
• the warehouse inspection checklist
• warehousing in New Delhi
• business warehousing

Sources. Rates, plan prices, network figures and facility details are Lozy's own published information, checked 25 October 2026. Sector context for online retail comes from IBEF and from the Press Information Bureau; GST registration and additional place of business from the GST portal; warehouse operating practice from the Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority; and highway and corridor context from NHAI. The technical minimums in the acceptance table are drafting benchmarks for a requirement sheet and are not a substitute for a structural, fire or licensed-engineer's certificate.

Last updated: 25 October 2026. Have a question the FAQ below does not answer? Call +91 93547 12345 or email care@lozy.in.