Reviewed 30 September 2026 · quarterly cycle
How do storage charges work after the free window?
They are charged per day beyond a free window, and they start from warehouse intake rather than from your approval, which is why a slow QC review can be expensive.
The evidence
The free window is a published policy rather than an industry standard, and its length varies by warehouse. What is consistent is the unit: days beyond the window, charged per day. The clock starts when the item is recorded at the warehouse, not when you look at the photographs, so the time you spend deciding is inside the chargeable period once the window closes.
The second timing detail matters more than the first. Extending the QC window as a holding service and exceeding the free storage window are different charges with different triggers. Where a warehouse offers both, the holding fee is usually smaller than the storage charge, which makes extending the review cheaper than leaving the parcel to sit.
The third detail is consolidation. Where several items arrive across a period, they share one storage clock only if they are held as one parcel. Items that arrive early accrue storage while waiting for items that arrive late, so a haul assembled from sellers with different dispatch speeds pays storage on the earliest arrivals. Ordering from fast sellers first and slow sellers second is a small optimisation with a measurable effect on a large haul.
When this does not apply
Where an item is held pending a QC query rather than sitting idle, some warehouses suspend the storage clock during the query. That is a policy rather than a rule, and it is worth asking about when a query is expected to run long.