Is your 3PL ready to attain its projected market share?

The 3PL market is projected to reach over $2 trillion by 2030. Is your 3PL ready for its share? You definitely should be with that projection! As your business grows, your customer base grows, as well as necessary complexities per customer. Most shipping systems, whether legacy technology or internally built efforts, place your business at high risk when trying to keep pace with growth, resulting in unhappy customers and employees. The burden is extremely expensive and time consuming.

At Shipium, we value building the best tools and technology to enable 3PLs to be successful with their customers. We’re relentless in adding new capabilities, and customer management (or tenant, or brand, or shipper—many names for the same thing, your customer) is one of the biggest areas of need for 3PLs, so we’ve designed our console to support your customers’ fulfillment requirements, absorbing the complexity and providing you with a perfectly designed solution to manage your tenants.

The endless amount of customer changes and tweaks

Every customer has unique needs, and the daily chore of tweaking your operations to accommodate is never ending. Here are just a few example situations our existing 3PL customers encountered just this month:

• You just landed a major new customer doing about 2 million shipments per year who wants to use your rates with FedEx but their rates with UPS. How do you set that up?
• One customer, a luxury apparel company, wants to do guaranteed 3-day shipping to every consumer. How do you ensure that is profitably met for just them, across carriers available to their account?
• One customer rebranded and needs to update the logo on their labels via a ZPL change. Meanwhile another customer wants to change their return address on labels. How do you easily manage label augmentation for each of them?
• A new customer moving over from a prior 3PL ships a lot of electronic items that have batteries. Air shipping methods can never be considered for their shipments because of hazmat categorization constraints. How do you restrict that mode while still optimizing for shipping speed, cost, and accuracy?
• A long-time valued customer wants to migrate buildings within your network, which will change the available carriers available to them. How do you make that transition easy, simple, and quick? Shipping shouldn’t be the long-pole in the tent.
• For the first time, a customer is requesting to use third party billing. How do you set that up on your own?
• You just added a new warehouse to your network and are launching with 5 existing customers who want to use that warehouse. How do you easily copy over all the shipping configurations those 5 customers use at other facilities to this one, without requiring custom development work?

You may currently use a legacy software system that requires custom software development work with every customer change, likely needing budget approval every time which is very expensive and time consuming for your team. Now multiply your update needs per facility—it takes months to provide necessary updates and many quality assurance hours to ensure everything is accurate before falling into the perils of updating invoices with hidden fees or applying discounts to alleviate customer frustrations. 

Or you may be a tech-forward 3PL that has built technology to manage these situations on top of a label API platform. It’s similar to the above situation in that it’s time consuming for your team and there are many intricate details to manage for your tenants’ ever-increasing needs.

Remain proactive and keep gaining your share 

Shipium’s console is ideal for 3PL customer management. It provides a seamless experience for operators. Some of our well-known 3PL enterprise customers are surprised by the level of complexity they can manage with easy console workflows and in-depth configurations and reporting. Our first-to-market console specific for 3PL customer management with many unique capabilities, such as Carrier Selection Rules, Third Party Billing, Configurable Groups, tagging features and Fulfillment Context while also providing the critical historical reports needed per customer.

The 3PL market will continue to grow and many are seeking to attain cutting edge technology to stand out and differentiate amongst the many other 3PLs. If you’re ready to stand out and differentiate, reach out today to get your conversation started. We’d love to connect.