Receiving

Your 3PL can’t ship orders if they don’t have your inventory! The receiving of inventory is one of the top warehousing operations that has to take place before your 3PL can start fulfilling orders for your online store. Receiving refers to the acceptance of incoming inventory followed by its storage.

Each 3PL has its own processes for receiving and storing inventory. For example, at ShipBob, we require clients to fill out a Warehouse Receiving Order (WRO) so that we know which products we will be receiving and how many units.

This helps us stay organized and timely with receiving, meaning we can start fulfilling your orders more quickly and efficiently.

Once we receive your inventory, we store your items in our fulfillment centers. Each SKU has a separate dedicated storage location, either on a shelf, in a bin, or on a pallet.

Picking

When your customer places an order, it’s time for the fulfillment process to begin! Some 3PLs require you to manually upload orders to their system; however, there are 3PLs (like ShipBob!) that can integrate with your online store and automatically push orders to your fulfillment provider.

This modern fulfillment software integrates with top ecommerce platforms and marketplaces to bring orders, shipments, inventory levels, and more together in one place.

As soon as an order is sent to your 3PL, it is assigned to a warehouse picking team or a picker. The picking team receives a picking list of the items, quantities, and storage locations at the facility to collect the ordered products from their respective locations.

Packing

When all items in an order have been picked, it’s time to get them securely packed up. Some 3PLs will charge for packing materials as a separate line item, while others include them as part of their fulfillment services.

At ShipBob, for example, plain, standard packing materials — brown boxes, yellow bubble mailers, white poly bags, packing tape, and dunnage — are included. We strive to choose the best packing materials to both protect your products and achieve the lowest practical dimensional weight. We also allow our clients to use custom packing materials to put their brand front and center at an additional cost.

Shipping

The next step is shipping your order. Most 3PLs will purchase and print shipping labels on your behalf. Some 3PLs have preferred carriers with whom they partner, while others compare shipping costs from a variety of carriers.

ShipBob does the latter to make sure that our clients receive the most affordable pricing possible for the delivery speed their customers choose.

Carriers such as DHL, USPS, and UPS pick up orders from fulfillment centers to ship. Once the order ships, you should automatically receive tracking info from your 3PL. With ShipBob, as soon as the order ships, tracking info is pushed back to our clients’ stores.