Top Tips for Choosing the Best 3PL Company

When choosing a 3PL Warehouse company to manage all of your warehousing and fulfillment, we highly recommend keeping the following points in mind:

• Do your due diligence – Make sure that you screen every potential company thoroughly. Take a look at the facilities, contact customers of theirs, research them online, and look at their better business bureau report. All of these factors can help sniff out any fly by night companies. The main point here is that you want to make sure the company can process your orders without many errors.
• Thoroughly research their pricing – Oftentimes, logistics companies will not give you every potential cost that might be incurred on their quote or estimate. This is a common practice to try to get you to think that their costs are the best. So to combat this intentionally dishonest practice, please be sure to not only ask the provider for ALL potential costs, but also ask them to provide you with a mock bill based upon a month’s worth of data. If you do this, you’ll actually be able to compare price quotes among various 3PL providers. Unfortunately, most fulfillment companies charge different, so it makes the process all the more difficult
• Factor in the value of a partnership – Remember, this is a huge component for someone else to manage. It is such a critical part of your company that you want to be sure they can be a true partner. A partner is someone that you trust and feel comfortable with to entrust such a big task to. So ask yourself this question, “Do I generally get a good feel about this company?” If the answer is no, don’t make the mistake of convincing yourself that their low pricing makes up for lack of partnership value. Trust your instincts…after all, you’ll be communicating with.