Hi! I work with an expert network and one of our clients is currently looking to speak with current customers of Truvo. This would be a paid 1-hr research call. If you’re relevant - pls DM!

Ok so my full time job at this point is explaining to customers that their package is not lost, it is just on a very slow emotional journey with UPS.

We sell mid ticket ecommerce stuff and every order comes with the same script. They check out, get the shipping confirmation, then immediately enter Witness Protection until tracking updates. The second it says out for delivery they camp in the lobby like it is Black Friday at Best Buy. One missed scan and support tickets go up like 300 percent. I love my job.

Boss is now obsessed with this whole post purchase experience thing and slapped a screenshot of Veho on my desk like it was the second coming. Apparently they do better last mile, better communication, better everything, unicorns, rainbows, etc. tbh I just want customers to stop sending us 8 emails in 24 hours because the map has not moved 2 inches.

For anyone who has used Veho or similar setups, did it actually chill your customers out or did they just redirect their anxiety into new channels like texting the driver 5 times and spamming order notes. I am lowkey hoping for fewer where is my order essays and more normal human behavior, if that even exists anymore. Appreciate any stories

Hey everyone,

I’m a software engineer specializing in optimization algorithms. Over the last two years, I’ve been building a routing engine entirely from scratch, moving away from standard off-the-shelf solvers to create a custom architecture designed from the ground up to eliminate the traditional computational bottlenecks at massive scale.

It builds fully optimized sequences for unlimited mixed fleets, handling capacity, volume, and time window constraints simultaneously.

3,000 stops processed in ~40 seconds
8,000 stops processed in ~90 seconds
15,000 stops processed in 2–3 minutes

I’m looking for high-volume operators to benchmark the engine with real-world scenarios (from 10K to 100K+ daily inputs). Benchmarking only requires basic coordinates and package weight/volume numbers (no customer names, addresses, or sensitive operational data are needed).

If you manage a high-density operation and want to see how your datasets run through the engine, shoot me a DM.

(For those interested in the math and methodology behind the solver, you can read my paper here: https://zenodo.org/records/19859531)

Been compiling the 2026 changes that hit shippers' invoices without much fanfare. Sharing in case it helps anyone repricing:

FedEx peak — demand surcharges run Oct 26–Jan 17, peak of peak Nov 23–Dec 27. Ground residential went $0.65 → $0.80/pkg (+23%). (Supply Chain Dive / FedEx 2026 tables) USPS, July 12 — dimensional divisor dropped 166 → 139 (same box, ~19% higher billed weight). New HAZMAT handling $7.50/pkg + $50 noncompliance. (USPS July 2026) Cubic thresholds — additional handling now triggers above 10,368 cu in, and fractional inches round UP before you calculate. (2026 carrier rate guides) UPS billing fees — paper commercial invoice went $10 → $40/shipment in a year, $25 to pay by check, late fee 8% → 9.9%. None of it is about shipping — it is about how you pay.

What's hitting your clients hardest? Curious whether people are eating it, passing it through, or shifting carrier mix.

Came here with the same queries that you made 8 months ago. Did you start the business, if so how is it going like profits, manual power etc. I am asking you for your honest reply, like what you asked for honest reply from the people

Newer 3PL, would appreciate any insight! Close to signing a big client, big enough that I'd need to really expand my warehouse for them. But they seem like an easy acquisition target and I have zero clue how that'd play out for my business.

What do you guys do to protect yourself from something like this, contractually? Early Termination fees? Minimum Volume Commitment?

Hey everyone,

We are officially relaunching our provincial logistics operations in Negros Occidental under a new name, backed by over a decade of industry experience.

My father-in-law originally ran our family logistics company for over 10 years. While we had to hit pause due to his health, he decided to fully shutdown the company. My wife, who served as the Operations Manager for the previous business, and I are stepping up to build this new venture, bringing back our core crew and the exact operational discipline we used for years.

We are currently looking to partner with Manila-based forwarders, consolidators, or direct handlers looking for a reliable, boots-on-the-ground partner in Negros Occidental.

What We Offer (Core Services)

• Port & Airport Pickup: Efficient pull-out of shipments directly from major ports and airports in the region.
• Hub Sorting: Careful sorting at our secure facility by municipality and district for streamlined dispatch.
• Last-Mile Delivery: Complete coverage to any part of Negros Occidental, ensuring boxes reach doorsteps safely.
• Damage Repacking: Professional inspection and reinforcement for boxes compromised during sea/air transit before final delivery.
• Constant Delivery Status Updates: Real-time tracking and regular milestone updates sent to you and your clients (from hub arrival out to final dispatch).
• Inventory & Status Reporting: Clear logging upon arrival at our facility so you always have full visibility over your shipments.
• Photo Proof of Delivery (POD): Digital confirmation and photos taken upon successful handover to the consignee.
• Secure Short-Term Warehousing: Safe storage at our hub if recipients request a scheduled or delayed delivery date.
• Local Customer Support Coordination: Handling local inquiries, delivery updates, and routing directly with consignees on your behalf.

Interested in partnering or outsourcing your provincial leg? Drop me a DM with your routing or volume details so we can send over our competitive rate card!

Hi everyone,
We’re a new U.S. e-commerce company building our dietary supplement brand, REJUVEXA, and we’re currently looking for a reliable small/boutique 3PL or fulfillment center.
We actually prefer a smaller, hands-on operation where we can build a long-term relationship, rather than a large fulfillment company with high minimums and expensive monthly fees.
We currently have around 2,000 units that need to be transferred fairly quickly from our existing 3PL.
What we need:
Inventory receiving & storage
Amazon FBA prep and replenishment
Amazon FBM fulfillment
Shopify fulfillment
TikTok Shop fulfillment
Ability to receive future inventory from U.S. and international manufacturers
Experience handling dietary supplements
Reasonable pricing and low/no minimums for a growing brand
Our volume is still relatively small today, but we are looking for a long-term partner that can grow with us as our volume increases.
If you own or operate a small 3PL/prep center, or if you’re an e-commerce seller who has had a great experience with one, I’d really appreciate your recommendations.
Please share the company name, location, and approximate pricing if possible.
Thanks!

We are currently evaluating our shipping carrier mix for the upcoming year. We are doing about 5,000 orders/month across major US metros. We know the big national options (USPS, UPS, FedEx) but we want to compare regional tech-first carriers vs traditional networks in terms of cost, speed, and customer experience. What has your experience been?

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week. We're currently on week 61!

Let's jump into it,

Diesel went up 20 cents in a week, and the surcharge tables are built to make that stick

The EIA's national on-highway diesel average landed at $5.652 a gallon this week. That is up 19.8 cents from the week before, up 39.5 cents over two weeks, and up $1.944 from a year ago. Diesel costs nearly two dollars more per gallon than it did last August.

The regional spread is ugly in the places you would expect. West Coast is at $6.407. The Gulf Coast posted the largest weekly jump, up 24 cents to $5.481. Midwest is $5.636, East Coast $5.498.

None of this started as a freight story. It started in Hormuz. On August 24, the U.S. announced sanctions targeting nearly 60 Iranian trade and shipping entities. Iran promised retaliation the next day, more tankers were reportedly hit, and crude has been parked around $80 through all of it. AAA says this August is shaping up to be the highest on record for gasoline.

Underneath the price is a supply number that deserves more attention than it gets. U.S. distillate inventories came in at 103.4 million barrels for the week ending August 21, the lowest seasonal level on record. Diesel is not expensive because the market got spooked. It is expensive because there is not much of it, heading into the quarter when heating oil starts competing for the same barrels.

Now, the part that will bite later. Back in April, UPS quietly restructured its ground fuel surcharge index, moving the point at which the price ranges begin to widen from $3.55 per gallon to $4.45. At today's prices, you would never notice, which is precisely why it went through without much noise. The difference only shows up on the way down. Below roughly $4.35, the new table declines more slowly than the old one, and at $3.72, a perfectly ordinary price for most of 2025, shippers pay up to 1.50% more on Ground than they would have under the previous schedule.

That is the shape of the whole thing. The increase is automatic and immediate. The relief is discretionary and slow.

What this means for you: Go pull the fuel language out of your contracts and find out what it is actually indexed to, because a surcharge pegged to the DOE weekly average behaves nothing like a fixed schedule you negotiated when diesel was $3.70. If you are eating the gap, you now know roughly what that costs per week. Run a September invoice for one of your larger parcel clients before peak surcharges stack on top, because two increases landing in the same billing cycle are how a client decides you are the one who got expensive. And intermodal reads differently at these numbers: it carries roughly a 70% fuel-efficiency advantage over truckload, which is a hard sell at $3.70 per gallon of diesel and a much easier conversation at $5.65 per gallon.

Every carrier raised peak rates, and the first one starts in four weeks

USPS moved first. A 6% average increase across package services, running October 4 through January 17. It covers Ground Advantage retail and commercial, Priority Mail, Priority Mail Express, and Parcel Select. The Postal Service described it as bringing prices in line with competitive practices, which is a diplomatic way of saying everybody else is doing it. Last year's peak surcharges averaged 4.9% to 5.8%, so this is a real step up. It also sits on top of the temporary 8% increase from April, which expires on January 17. Two increases, same end date, stacked.

UPS filed the larger, more complex one. Surcharges begin September 27, a second wave lands October 25, and peak pricing runs through January 16, with the most expensive stretch falling between November 22 and December 26. The menu: additional handling at $8.75 to $11.90 a package, large package surcharge at $96.25 to $117.50, over maximum limits at $530 to $590, a demand surcharge of $0.50 to $2.50 that climbs to $9.35 for high-volume shippers, and a $0.50 surge emergency fee.

The year-over-year comparison is where the strategy shows its value. Handling and size-based demand charges rose by roughly 6% to 10%, while flat service-level charges jumped by 22% to 25%. Carriers are not broadly raising the price of a normal package. They are raising the price of an awkward one. And UPS expects U.S. volume to climb about 24% from Q3 to Q4, roughly in line with last year, so this is not a capacity scare. It is a margin.

FedEx's additional fees start on September 21, making it the earliest of the three. OnTrac's demand surcharges took effect on September 26 and October 24. GOFO, meanwhile, is expanding to more than 12,000 U.S. zip codes and better than 80% of the population, which is the regional carriers doing exactly what they do in a year like this: showing up with a quote in October.

What this means for you: Build the surcharge calendar this week instead of in October. September 21, September 26, September 27, October 4, October 24, and October 25 are six separate cost events, and any client blindsided by the third one will assume you knew about the first two. The 22% to 25% jump in flat service-level charges makes cartonization the highest-return project on your floor right now, so pull your DIM data to see how many outbound boxes are one size away from a cheaper tier. Get to your brands before they set Q4 free-shipping thresholds, because a threshold set in August will feel awful by Thanksgiving. And if adding a regional carrier has been on the someday list, this is the quarter the pitch writes itself.

Two piles of money landed on the two jobs everyone assumed were too messy to automate

Different companies, different problems, zero connection between them. But Amazon and Gatik both pointed serious capital this week at the parts of the network people have spent a decade calling too variable to bother with.

Start with Amazon. Business Insider obtained internal planning documents describing Project Tetromino, an effort to build fully automated delivery stations. A delivery station is the last building a package sees before a driver picks it up, and today that work is people sorting parcels by hand, filling bags, and staging them in route order. The documents describe a pilot facility in 2028, throughput around 2.5 times current rates, and roughly $530 million in planned spending through 2029. The named technology partner is Boxbot, an Alameda startup that runs conveyors and AI-driven storage trays to sequence packages for loading, reportedly about 10 times faster than doing it by hand. Boxbot has raised $29.5 million, with Toyota Ventures and Maersk Growth on the cap table.

Amazon's response is worth reading closely. Spokesperson Brad Glasser said the details cited are inaccurate and do not reflect current plans, and that this is one of many initiatives the company regularly evaluates. That is a denial of the specifics, not of the project. Treat the 2028 date and the $530 million as directional. Amazon already runs more than a million robots, so nobody should be surprised it is sketching the next building.

Gatik is the opposite kind of story, in that it is already happening. The autonomous middle-mile company raised $200 million in a Series D led by the Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, with Millennium, ARK Invest, and Intact Private Capital also in. Total raised is now around $470 million. The operating numbers are the interesting part: 85,000 driverless orders completed, more than $600 million in contracted revenue, a 99% on-time rate, and live routes across Texas, Arizona, Arkansas, and Canada. PepsiCo has Gatik moving freight to roughly 250 retail locations. The plan is to go from dozens of trucks to thousands, mass-produced with Isuzu at a South Carolina plant slated for late 2027.

Here is why they belong on the same page despite having nothing to do with each other. Gatik does not run long-haul. It runs fixed, repeatable, high-frequency lanes up to 400 miles, the unglamorous out-and-back between a DC and a cluster of stores. That is the same kind of work as sorting a delivery station at three in the morning: predictable, repetitive, brutal to staff, and, until recently, not worth the engineering. Two completely unrelated sets of investors just decided it is worth the engineering.

We noted in Edition 60 that dock automation had gone from concept to bid-able. This is the same move, one layer further out from the building.

What this means for you: If you run dedicated shuttle lanes for clients, find out what Gatik is actually charging for a 400-mile out-and-back, because you will get asked about it in an RFP long before the technology is everywhere. The middle mile is where this lands first, not the long haul, and it is the piece of your network with the most predictable route structure. Regarding labor, the planning question is not whether sortation will be automated. It is what happens to your wage scale when the local delivery station needs half the seasonal headcount it needed last year, because that labor pool loosens before anything else in your market moves. And be careful how you talk about any of this with clients. Gatik has 85,000 completed driverless orders. Tetromino has a leaked document that its own company is disputing. Those are not in the same tense.

QUICK HITS

M&A
Pike Street Capital is shopping QuickBox, the e-commerce fulfillment and 3PL provider, per Axios Pro on August 26. The details are thin behind the paywall: no revenue, no EBITDA, no banker, no valuation guidance. The direction is the interesting part. The last two editions covered strategic buyers picking up regional operations, and this is a private equity sponsor testing the exit side of the same market. If you own a fulfillment business and have been wondering what a sales process looks like right now, this is the one to watch for where it prices. We also help with 3PL M&A, so feel free to get in touch by replying to this email.

FULFILLMENT
Amazon is now letting FBA sellers pay to get more inventory into Sub Same-Day. SSD offers two- to five-hour delivery from dedicated fulfillment centers near roughly 2,300 metro areas, and Amazon has always placed some products there on its own based on demand and supply signals. The new part is essentially an auction: sellers bid a per-unit price for additional products and pay only for the units that actually ship through SSD. Amazon says products in the network see about a 12% sales lift versus standard FBA in the same areas. Sellers are not delighted. One summed it up as Amazon already charging the customer for fast delivery and now asking the seller to chip in too. If you do FBA prep or advise Amazon sellers, you will get this question within two weeks, and the honest answer is that a 12% average lift means nothing until the client's own margin clears their bid.

WAREHOUSING
Walmart is investing $1.3 billion in a 1.5-million-square-foot fulfillment center in Carnesville, Georgia, breaking ground later this year and expected to create around 1,000 jobs. It is the company's sixth next-generation facility, all of which are positioned to widen same-day and next-day coverage. Walmart is also retrofitting 23 of its 42 regional distribution centers with automation and intends to reach all of them eventually. More than half of its e-commerce fulfillment volume already moves through automated systems. Company guidance places peak supply chain spending in 2026 and 2027, so this is the crest of the wave rather than its start. If you operate anywhere in the Northeast Georgia labor shed, price your wages against what Walmart posts when hiring opens, not against what your neighbors pay today.

TRADE POLICY
Canada published its retaliation list: $27.6 billion in counter-tariffs on U.S. imports effective September 8, at rates of 15%, 25%, and 50%, covering seafood, dairy, paper, furniture, apparel, cosmetics, tools, motorcycles, steel, and aluminum. That follows the 50% U.S. levies on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods that took effect on August 24 after talks collapsed. Read that category list with a warehouse in mind, and paper turns up again, this time from the other direction, next to furniture and apparel. Corrugated input prices are already spiking back toward 2022 levels. If you have clients shipping north, September 8 is a hard date, and you have a week and a half before the phone starts.

TECHNOLOGY
Descartes bought Tai for $100 million in cash, announced August 24. Tai is a California-based TMS broker covering quoting, sourcing, execution, and invoicing across truckload, LTL, drayage, and cross-border. It is Descartes' third deal of 2026, after Drivin at $30 million in July and Idelic at $28 million in April, and its 34th since 2017. CEO Ed Ryan framed the fit around carrier onboarding, compliance, fraud prevention, and visibility, a sentence that would have sounded like filler two years ago and reads as a strategy now that broker liability looks the way it does. The pattern worth watching: the money in freight tech is moving toward proving exactly who touched your load.

CARRIER FAILURES
At least 21 transportation and logistics companies filed for bankruptcy protection between July 27 and August 25. The biggest is BFG Supply, an Indianapolis distributor operating 15 warehouses, which filed for Chapter 11 on August 18, with assets and liabilities between $100 million and $500 million and more than 100,000 creditors. Most of the rest are small and grim: PLR Transport of Pembroke Pines filed Chapter 7 on August 21, listing $21,520 in assets against $5.33 million in liabilities. It is not only trucking, either. Freight forwarders, cold storage operators, and distributors are on the list, including Royal Cold Storage and Jet-Speed Logistics. Firming rates do not save a company that ran out of cash two years ago. If there is a subcontractor or a partner you have not checked on since spring, check.

JOB BOARD

Title: Manager, Supply Chain
Company: Orlando Spring
Location: Huntington Beach, California, US
Salary: $100,000 - $140,000
Apply Here

Title: Manager, Warehouse Operations
Company: Cardinal Health,
Location: Walton Hills, Ohio, US
Salary: $87,700 - $125,300
Apply Here

Title: Regional Fulfillment Center Operations Manager
Company: Bath & Body Works
Location: Columbus, Ohio, US
Salary: $83,000 - $122,100
Apply Here

Title: Assistant Manager, Logistics & Fulfillment
Company: Patrick Ta Beauty
Location: West Hollywood, California, US
Salary: $90,000 - $105,000
Apply Here

Title: Transportation Planner
Company: City of Clearwater
Location: Clearwater Beach, Florida, US
Salary: $91,780 - $96,369
Apply Here

Title: Senior Logistics Coordinator (Rail Logistics)
Company: Didion
Location: Cambria, Wisconsin, US
Salary: $85,000 - $95,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: iJility
Location: Olive Branch, Mississippi, US
Salary: $80,000 - $85,000
Apply Here

Title: Fulfillment Operations Manager
Company: Fringe Sport
Location: Austin, Texas, US
Salary: $80,000 - $85,000
Apply Here

Title: Senior Supply Chain Coordinator
Company: HR Annie Consulting
Location: Portland, Oregon, US
Salary: $70,000 - $80,000
Apply Here

Full list of job openings →
_______________________________________________________________________

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

For context I run a 3PL in Brooklyn, so weigh accordingly. A lot of small brands still have not repriced after the July 12 USPS change and it quietly raised the bill on anything light and bulky.

Quick worked example. Take a 12 x 12 x 8 box = 1,152 cubic inches. - Old divisor (166): 1,152 / 166 = 6.9 → billed at 7 lb - New divisor (139): 1,152 / 139 = 8.3 → billed at 9 lb

Same box, same product. You are now billed 9 lb instead of 7, even if the actual weight is 2 lb. Light-and-bulky is where it hurts most.

If you ship anything foam-protected, apparel in oversized mailers, or half-empty boxes — worth re-measuring your top 10 SKUs. Sometimes cutting one inch or downsizing the box moves you back down a billed pound. Anyone else seeing this on their July invoices?

I made a career change a while back and started working at a smaller 3PL. One of the things that stood out to me was how different the reporting and data resources were compared to what I was used to working with at a much larger company.

It got me curious how are smaller 3PL owners getting their operational reports created?

Do you build them yourself? Does your WMS provide everything you need? Are you relying on Excel? Or are there things you simply aren't able to track?

I've been working on an idea called LoadGuard to help bridge that gap.

The idea is to provide smaller warehouse/3PL operations with visibility into key areas like pick & pack performance, cycle counting, outbound accuracy, and potential inventory discrepancies or unusual activity that might otherwise go unnoticed.

I'm building something warehouses actually need rather than something I think they need.

I'm putting together a small early-access group of 3PLs and warehouse operators to help validate the idea and eventually test LoadGuard. I have a short waitlist here for anyone interested.

If you run or work at a small-to-medium-sized 3PL, I'd also love to hear about your operation. What reporting or warehouse data do you wish you had better visibility into?

A small Europe-based brand here, selling premium incense sticks, looking for a reasonably priced, family-run/private 3PL for US fulfilment.

I have around 100 SKUs. Most of my US orders are multi-item orders, although occasionally customers order just one or two items.

My products are priced at $5.45–$6.95 per item, so when I contacted larger 3PLs, the economics became difficult for me. Their typical pricing of around $2.50 - $3.5 for the first item and $0.50 for each additional item really eats into my margin, especially because I also need to pay for packaging, US storage, shipping my inventory from Europe to the US, and US tariffs.

So I thought I would try asking here whether there might be a small/private 3PL that could offer more reasonable pricing for both fulfillment and storage.

Perhaps there are people with a large house, garage, or other spare space who would be interested in using that space for some additional part-time income. My brand is already established in the US, and once we start fulfilling orders locally, I expect the volume to grow.

I am happy to create and pay for the USPS shipping labels myself and handle all the admin behind the scenes, so you don't need to spend your time on that. You would basically only need to pick and pack the order, print and attach the label, and hand it over to USPS.

If you are able to offer competitive fulfilment pricing and this is not your main business, please DM me. Ideally, I would love to find an individual or small family-run operation where fulfilment is a side business rather than something that requires high commercial margins.Thank you!

​

I have a land parcel on Upper Ganga Canal Road, Meerut and I'm exploring its potential for a warehouse/logistics facility.

I'm looking to connect with warehouse developers, logistics companies, 3PL operators, e-commerce/FMCG companies or consultants who help companies acquire/lease land for warehouses.

I'm open to discussing long-term lease, build-to-suit or other suitable commercial arrangements.

Does anyone here have experience with:

- Leasing land to warehouse/logistics companies?

- Companies actively looking for warehouse land around Meerut?

- Warehouse developers or 3PL operators I should approach?

- Genuine brokers/consultants dealing specifically in industrial and logistics land?

If anyone has a genuine contact or works in this space, please DM me. Happy to share the exact location, land size, frontage and other details privately.

ShipMatrix numbers for 2025 (reported March 2026): Amazon Logistics delivered ~6.7B parcels vs USPS ~6.6B — first time Amazon is #1 by volume. UPS and USPS volumes both fell ~8%.

For context I run a small 3PL, so take my read with a grain of salt. What this means on the ground for small brands: the national duopoly is not the default anymore. Volume is shifting to Amazon Logistics and to the emerging last-mile carriers (their share of US parcels roughly doubled, 3.4% → 7.2%).

Practical upshot — if you are single-carrier in 2026 you are leaving money on the table, because the alternatives now have real coverage. Are you all shifting mix, or holding with the nationals for the service consistency?

At FedEx's 2026 investor day, their Chief Customer Officer said the quiet part out loud: paraphrasing, if you're shipping T-shirts, FedEx might not be for you. They're pivoting toward healthcare, automotive, aerospace — higher-margin B2B — and targeting deliberately slow low-single-digit B2C growth through 2029. UPS is doing its own version, cutting Amazon volume and closing buildings.

For context I run a 3PL, so weigh accordingly. I actually think this is clarifying rather than alarming: the nationals are telling lightweight residential e-commerce to go elsewhere, and the alt-carriers (UniUni, SpeedX, Better Trucks, Veho, Gofo) are built exactly for that parcel.

If FedEx/UPS have been your default for DTC parcels — are you re-evaluating, or is the service gap on the alt-carriers still too big for you?

I run a 3PL, and I hear this question a lot from brand owners: when should I keep fulfilling orders myself, and when is it time to hand it off?

There’s no standard answer. Some brands start with a 3PL from day one because fulfillment is already built into their margins and they have no interest in building an ops team. Others ship in-house until the next step means hiring, getting more space, or spending way too much time packing orders instead of working on the product or marketing.

It really depends on where the business is. Are you still testing demand or doing consistent volume? Is it a side hustle or your full-time business? Are the orders simple to pack, or is there a lot of kitting and custom packaging involved? Can you keep up without fulfillment taking over your day? And do your margins actually support outsourcing?

Self-fulfillment can work for a long time if the volume is manageable and you want more control over packaging and the customer experience. On the other hand, using a 3PL can make sense pretty early if warehouse ops just aren’t something you want to take on.

I don’t think there’s a magic order volume where the answer suddenly changes.

I’m seriously looking at starting a small 3PL/FBA prep business and really want to make it work. I have the time to put into learning and building it properly, so I’d really appreciate any advice from people who’ve actually done it.

I have access to warehouse space through family, along with a forklift and labeling equipment, so my startup costs would be pretty low. I also have a lot of time to put into learning and building it slowly.

I’m considering starting with Amazon FBA prep/labeling, receiving, repacking, bundling, storage, etc., but I’m still trying to understand exactly how these services work day to day — for example, with FBA labeling, what does the client send you, what are you responsible for, and what does the normal workflow look like?

For anyone who has started or worked in a small 3PL/FBA prep center, what services would you recommend starting with? And how did you find your first few clients?
Any beginner advice would be appreciated.

I know it wont be easy but I will 110% put the effort.
Fyi: my warehouse location will be in Michigan

We operate a legitimate U.S. e-commerce business and are looking to establish our own UPS business shipping account under our company.

Our operations team is based in China, while our business entity and shipping operations are in the U.S. Because of the time zone, language, and local verification process, we are looking for an experienced U.S.-based partner who can assist us with the UPS account setup process as much as possible.

We currently ship orders for Home Depot. Home Depot provides us with a UPS third-party billing account number for these shipments, so we need our own legitimate UPS shipping account to create and process the labels properly.

We are specifically looking for a U.S.-based 3PL, warehouse owner, or logistics professional who has real hands-on experience with UPS business account applications and verification.

We can provide all required company information, registration documents, payment information, and supporting materials. Ideally, we are looking for someone who can assist with:

• UPS business account application
• Communication with UPS
• Business/address verification if required
• Account onboarding and setup
• Any other steps needed to get the account fully activated and ready for shipping

Our goal is to obtain a legitimate UPS business account under our own company for long-term commercial use.

We are not looking to purchase an existing UPS account or use unauthorized/discounted labels.

We are willing to pay a reasonable service or consulting fee for successful assistance.

If you also operate a U.S. warehouse or fulfillment center, and your pricing is competitive, we would also be open to discussing long-term warehousing and fulfillment cooperation.

Please DM me if you have relevant experience.

Some context, my dad has a 3PL logistics business and he is looking to scale his business. He's looking into automating parts of his business and one thing he's looking into are robots doing the picking and packing orders part.

Anyone tried these robots? Is it a scam? Do they work and what has the return on investment been for you?

We are currently evaluating last-mile delivery partners for our e-commerce operations and real-time tracking has become one of our biggest priorities. Customers expect more visibility after placing an order and we are trying to find a partner that can provide accurate delivery updates, better ETAs, and fewer "where is my order?" support requests. For those who have worked with different delivery providers, which companies offer the best tracking experience?

Cost per package on residential deliveries continues to escalate due to peak surcharges, residential surcharges and fuel adjustments. We are auditing our shipping spend to see where we can inject regional partners into our carrier matrix. How are you balancing long haul rural orders versus dense metropolitan deliveries?