Third-party logistics partners- Driving seamless logistics management

Shipsy
2 min readAug 26, 2021

Outsourcing logistics management services to a third-party aggregator has become a common practice for both the startups and well-established e-commerce brands. That’s because managing them in-house requires having the sufficient infrastructure, resources, and a huge team to look after different operations. A 3PL or courier service provider takes care of end-to-end delivery processes. Once you hire a third-party logistics provider, you can forget all the delivery-related woes and focus on your core business. But it is imperative to choose the right courier services provider to get the worth of your money.

In this age of instant gratification, a customer wants a product at their preferred time and date; a 3PL can help e-commerce brands to meet this goal and improve delivery experience. After you tie up with a delivery service provider, you can ensure the following-

Reduced delivery costs

The overall delivery costs include cost of transportation, storage, fuel, idling of engine, and more. An e-commerce company with inefficient delivery management can find it hard to minimize this cost. However, 3PL companies use logistics management software that help them in accomplishing tasks on time and avoiding routing-related problems, which contributes to achieving customer satisfaction.

No investment in infrastructure and resources

If you choose in-house delivery management, you would need to invest in setting up warehouses, managing inventories, setting up and maintaining fleet, hiring delivery drivers, and more. A 3PL can relieve you from this hassle.

Business scalability

A third-party logistics partner can be really helpful when you want to expand your business reach or enter new markets. You can start selling your products directly to that market without thinking about investing in fleet, renting warehouses, hiring delivery personnel, and more.

Improved customer experience

Having expertise and experience in the logistics domain definitely makes 3PL a suitable choice for those with no knowledge of deliveries, consumer behaviour, changing delivery trends, and more. A 3PL manages their delivery processes in a way to maximize customer satisfaction with on-time deliveries. It also ensures that the deliveries are being done at the minimum cost possible.

How to manage multiple third-party logistics services providers?

You have hired multiple 3PL partners to look after your business logistics operations, but how you would measure their performance. How you would track multiple deliveries that are being done by different 3PLs. A simple solution to it is to integrate a 3PL aggregator or courier aggregator platform. The platform offers unified tracking, analytics and insights, and a variety of other features to make the entire delivery process transparent. Moreover, you can also get real-time updates on the delivery status as well as other processes.

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