3PL

From time to time, you'll hear webshop owners talk about 3PL experiences and 3PL solutions. It's simply one of the many abbreviations you come across in the e-commerce industry.

There are many good reasons to outsource parts of your logistics. Some do it simply because they don't want to handle the product they sell. They just want to focus on marketing, sales and customer service. They are not interested in the logistics themselves and therefore outsource it. Others do the opposite and outsource the marketing and handle all the logistics themselves. What's right for you as a webshop owner is up to you to decide.

The typical 3PL solutions are

• Freight solutions and freight management
• Warehouse hosting

The advantage of a 3PL is that they are usually really good at picking many orders, as they have worked with it for several years and thus developed good workflows - some use robots.

Another plus is that they often handle workflows for many webshops and thus have late pickup from the various shipping companies and perhaps also a particularly good shipping agreement, as they ship many orders. They also purchase larger quantities of packaging than the individual webshop and therefore usually have access to cheaper packaging. So in some cases, you can save on shipping and packaging (and man hours) when you outsource your logistics to a 3PL company.

As a rule, 3PL is not something you consider as a webshop start-up.