Hi All. My warehouse is considering offering 3PL services and I've been assigned the task to look into what all goes into this. Would anyone be open to educating me some on this business model? Thank you for any help!
I run a small 3PL — 7 Shopify clients, 20–100 orders/day, ship through Canada Post. Every morning is the same dance: open each client's Shopify admin in its own Chrome profile, find orders, switch over to print the label, paste tracking back into the right Shopify, mark fulfilled, repeat. Around 14 clicks per order. Marked the wrong client's order fulfilled twice in one week.
Big WMS platforms (ShipHero, Extensiv) want $500+/month which doesn't math at our volume, and nothing in our budget really solves the multi-Shopify-admin part.
I've been thinking about building a desktop app that looks something like this:
The idea: connect all your client Shopify stores into one window, and plug in whatever shipping account you already use — Canada Post, ShipStation, EasyShip, or your own private carrier accounts (UPS, FedEx, Purolator, etc.). No new rates, no markup. Just one desktop view for everything.
Before I build it for real, want to know if I'm imagining a problem only I have.
For other small 3PLs:
Genuinely asking — happy to scrap the idea if it's just me.
Quick question for the pros: we'd looking to intake cards from customers/ebay/whatnot/etc. in an oregon/delaware warehouse and have large quantities of raw/graded singles of pokemon trading cards carefully handled, photographed, and stored, and then have them shipped individually (or stored indefinitely).
Would something like this be possible/accommodatable with a 3pl or do we have to spin this up ourselves? We're a small card shop at the moment, but this is necessary for our online shop. Thanks so much in advance for the help!
Currently running an operation out of southern california and we have 1 client. Doing about 4000 orders per month, $8k revenue. My problem is and has always been getting MORE clients. I have a few friends in the ecom space but obviously the pipeline only having ~30 people in it is not sustainable for growth.
how do i get in contact with more brand owners to get clients consistently?
(Vendor flair, but not selling anything today. Trying to learn before we build the wrong thing.)
We're an early-stage robotics company focused on the work most automation skips: high-mix jobs where SKUs rotate, items vary, and the ROI math on a traditional cell doesn't pencil.
Looking to talk to operators in the NYC metro (NJ, Long Island, Westchester, CT welcome) about where a flexible arm could actually earn its keep.
Tasks we think we can handle that most robots can't:
What's different:
Ask:
Strong fit could turn into a free pilot, but the conversation is the ask today.
I am working with an Apparel brand to find a 3PL partner so that they can scale the volumes, I am already speaking to a few, but would love to get more quotes in the mix. I have added all the details here - https://forms.gle/dfh4zBrLnddBY7916
If this is in your wheelhouse, would love to have a conversation
Hi everyone. I’m not sure if any of you have a production partner in China like I do.
My current problem is that I need a new 3PL to handle my logistics, primarily to ship goods to Europe and the U.S.
I’ve lost certain sales in the past due to poor 3PL choices, and I feel that the 3PL I’m currently working with is charging a bit high...
So I would really appreciate your advice on this urgently.
If your company is spending $500-$1,000+/week on shipping and you haven’t looked at Worldwide Express lately, it might be worth a conversation.
We’re the only UPS partner focused on SMBs, so we’re able to offer aggressive UPS pricing while still using the same UPS network and technology. We also work with most major LTL carriers for freight.
A lot of companies we talk to are surprised by how much they can save without changing much operationally.
If you want me to take a look at your current rates and see if there’s anything there, feel free to DM me.
The only caveat is that we cannot work with shippers who primarily ship with UPS directly through something like WorldShip or UPS.com.
International apparel fulfillment is breaking my brain and I need to hear how other brands are handling it.
We have solid US fulfillment from a domestic warehouse but UK, Australia, and Canada are getting expensive fast. Shipping rates, duties, and returns from those markets back to a US warehouse make the math work only on higher price point items, and we sell a lot of items that don't qualify.
The three options I keep cycling through: regional warehouses in each market (capital nightmare, SKU split across three locations is a forecasting disaster in apparel), a single-location provider that ships internationally (solves the capital problem but returns are still routing to a US warehouse), or origin fulfillment since our inventory literally starts in China before we ship it here anyway, so why are we sending it here first for international orders.
The return rate in apparel is what keeps derailing every version of this. Has anyone solved international apparel fulfillment in a way that doesn't make returns completely uneconomical?
I use Shipbob. I have customers that often want same or next day. Rarely can Shipbob get something out the same day which means 2 day delviery for some customers.
We are offering 3PL services in US. We have warehousing facitlities, same day delivery and dispatch. Is this the right place to post about it ?
Hey everyone. Been in this situation for about 2 months now and could use some perspective. Also thank you everyone for replying to my last post trying to learn about how to go about implementing WMS. Really helpful insights. But rn I dont think that should be my focus and you will know why below.
I got brought into a small warehousing/logistics business through a family friend. (50,000sqft) The deal is: if I work hard and bring in clients, I can eventually get a share of the business and have real autonomy over how it runs. Long term I want to modernize the whole operation: implement a WMS, clean everything up, make it actually efficient. But that’s years away.
Right now the operation is entirely manual. No WMS, no real systems just guys receiving, dispatching, and running everything by hand. I mentioned a WMS on day one and my partner was open to it, but nothing has moved since it would be on me to drive it, and I don’t feel like I have the standing to push for big operational changes without having closed a single client yet.
On the sales side I’ve had a few meetings and sent out some quotes, but nothing closed yet. I’m also working with a marketing agency that’s presenting a client acquisition strategy to me next week. So things are moving, just slowly.
My awkward problem: I feel this pull to be at the warehouse, but when I go there’s literally nothing for me to do. My job is to bring in clients, not receive freight. So I just end up sitting around while the guys do their thing 😂
Has anyone been in a similar position? kind of an outsider trying to earn their way in while also trying to modernize a business? What should I be focused on right now?
Ps. Im not complaining or anything. Feel extremely blessed to have this opportunity. And I’m not getting payed for doing nothing. Will start getting payed when I bring in clients. But I also feel lost because there’s really no one management side that goes to the warehouse every day. They work away and rarely show up to the warehouse.
Hey everyone. So I just started as a freight broker for a 3PL company is Tennessee. This is my first time in logistics, but have tons of experience in sales. I have been at this job for about a month now and am trying to figure out the best way to get actual qualified leads. I’ve mainly been using ChatGPT and Google Maps and focusing more on local or just in my region. I’ve put a big focus on Food Manufacturers/Industry. I landed my first very small customer this way via ChatGPT, but I need more. I’m running out of leads and just keep stumbling across the same ones I’ve already contacted. Are there any other services I could use? I’ve had one person tell me about Thomas.net but I wasn’t sure and wanted to see what other people say. Any helpful advice would be so greatly appreciated!
So a bit of background — I'm from Karachi. About a year ago I got frustrated with how broken e-commerce operations were here. Shopify on one tab, courier portal on another, COD reconciliation in a spreadsheet, and absolutely no way to know which of your ad campaigns were actually resulting in delivered orders vs returns sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
So I built SafarSystems. Unified shipment dashboard, Shopify sync, bulk label printing, barcode scanning at dispatch, COD tracking per order, and analytics that tie your Facebook/Instagram/Google spend to actual delivered revenue by city. Been running with real brands here for a while now and it's genuinely working.
Now I want to find out if the problem exists elsewhere.
And honestly — COD is only part of it. The core problem is that most e-commerce ops tools are either too basic or built for massive Western 3PLs. If you're a mid-sized brand doing serious volume without a $50k/month tech budget, the tooling is usually terrible regardless of payment method.
So whether you're dealing with COD chaos in Egypt, the Philippines, Saudi, Romania — or just struggling with courier management, return tracking, or channel analytics in a market that Shopify doesn't fully support — I'd love to talk.
A few things worth knowing:
Short demo video here. Ask me anything.
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I keep seeing 3PLs expand into freight services for their clients.
The argument is simple:
Better rates, better control, less back-and-forth vs dealing with separate forwarders.
But I’ve also heard it can become a mess operationally and not always worth it unless done properly.
So I’m trying to understand both sides:
3PLs - has this actually increased margins / retention? Or just added complexity?
Brands -do you trust your 3PL more with freight, or prefer independent partners?
Genuinely trying to understand where this works vs where it doesn’t.
Are there any 3PLs that utilize hotshot truckers vs standard LTL or TL?
