Is Your 3PL Partner Slowing You Down?

Jasmine Mitchell
Jul 9
2 min read

If you’ve been in e-commerce long enough, you know the moment. You wake up to customer complaints and your inbox full of “Where’s my order?” messages. Your marketing team is pulling in traffic, your products are flying off shelves, but your operations team? They’re drowning.

More often than not, the issue isn’t your team. It’s your fulfillment partner.

As your brand grows, your needs change. What worked at 10 orders a day won’t cut it at 300. So, how do you know when your 3PL is holding you back?

Here are the top signs:

1. Your fulfillment partner is slow to ship, or doesn’t follow SLAs.

Shipping speed is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s a customer expectation. If your 3PL can’t consistently meet your service level agreements (SLAs), you’re not just losing efficiency, you’re losing trust.

Late shipments, inaccurate tracking updates, or delays during peak season are all signs that your fulfillment partner isn’t built for your level of volume.

2. You have no visibility into what’s actually happening.

If your 3PL doesn’t give you transparent, real-time reporting, that’s a red flag. You should be able to see:

Daily order output
Inventory levels by SKU
Order exceptions
Warehouse performance metrics

If you’re flying blind or relying on emailed spreadsheets, you’re wasting time chasing data instead of making decisions.

3. You’re constantly finding inventory issues or packing errors.

At scale, small mistakes have big consequences. A miscount here or a wrong SKU there can lead to:

Chargebacks from retail partners
Refunds to angry DTC customers
Delays in reordering your top sellers

A high-volume fulfillment partner should have double-verification systems in place and warehouse teams trained to handle fewer SKUs with higher precision.

4. You’re still acting like the middleman.

If you’re constantly relaying information between your 3PL and your marketing, customer service, or product teams, something’s broken.

Your fulfillment partner should integrate with your systems, communicate proactively, and operate like an extension of your brand, not a black hole that you have to manage daily.

5. You’re growing, but your 3PL can’t scale with you.

Maybe you’ve recently landed a retail deal. Maybe your TikTok ad just went viral. Whatever the reason, your order volume is growing fast.

A fulfillment partner that’s not ready to scale will:

Cap your capacity
Delay onboarding new products
Struggle to maintain accuracy as volume increases

If you’re holding back your marketing team or delaying launches because ops can’t keep up, your 3PL is costing you more than money. It’s costing you momentum.