Fulfilment
What is a 3PL?
A 3PL is a third-party logistics provider: a company that stores your stock in its warehouse and picks, packs and ships your orders for you. You sell; they fulfil.
The warehouse is the easy part to hand over. The harder question is who owns the stock count once the stock is in someone else's building, because from that day there are two.
What a 3PL warehouse does
- Receiving
- Goods in from suppliers, counted and checked against the purchase order.
- Storage
- Racking, bins and locations in their building, charged by pallet, bin or cubic space.
- Pick and pack
- Each order picked, packed and labelled, charged per order and per item.
- Dispatch
- Handed to carriers on their negotiated rates, with tracking back to you.
- Returns
- Goods back in, inspected and either restocked or written off.
Whether a 3PL costs less than running your own warehouse is set out on stock and fulfilment.
Three ways to fulfil, and who holds the count
Your own warehouse
Who runs it
You own the building, the staff and the stock system.
The stock count
One count, yours.
A 3PL
Who runs it
They run the building and the picking on their own warehouse system.
The stock count
Two counts: theirs from the shelf, yours from the orders. One has to be nominated.
Fulfilled by Amazon
Who runs it
Amazon stores and ships, mainly for Amazon orders, with Multi-Channel Fulfilment for others.
The stock count
Amazon's count for units in its buildings, and yours for anything on your own shelves.
Amazon's fulfilment options are set out on Amazon inventory management.
Before the first pallet moves
The count
Which system is right when the 3PL's figure and yours disagree.
Orders out
How orders from every channel reach their system, and how fast.
Stock back
How receipts, adjustments and returns flow back to the figure your channels sell from.
The ledger
How their invoices and your stock value reconcile at month end.
Settled before the move, a 3PL is capacity on demand. Left to be worked out afterwards, it's a second version of the truth. How a stock system holds counts across locations, a 3PL included, is on stock control software.
Moving stock to a 3PL
Tell us which channels you sell through, where the stock sits now and which 3PL you're talking to. We'll reply with how the count, the orders and the ledger should connect.