Fulfillment
What is 3PL?
Third-Party Logistics
A company that stores your inventory and picks, packs, and ships your orders across your sales channels, so you keep one stockroom instead of running your own warehouse.
Why it matters in practice
The reason to use a 3PL is rarely the warehouse itself. It is that one pool of inventory can serve every channel you sell on, so a unit does not have to be committed to a marketplace before you know where the demand will land. Splitting stock across a marketplace program and your own site means guessing that split weeks ahead, and being wrong in both directions at once. The trade is control and visibility. You are handing over the part of the customer experience the customer actually sees, so the things worth judging a partner on are the unglamorous ones: how fast an order leaves after it drops, how accurately it is picked, what happens when something is wrong, and whether their system tells your system the truth about stock levels without a delay you have to work around.
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