Evaluate five things: order accuracy and on-time performance, pricing transparency, whether they support your sales channels and product category, the quality of their customer service (to you and to your shoppers), and whether they behave like a partner or a vendor. The cheapest quote is rarely the lowest total cost.
1. Accuracy and reliability come first
If a 3PL ships the wrong item or ships late, your customer blames you, not them. So start here, and start with numbers.
Ask any prospective partner for their order accuracy rate and their on-time ship performance. A best-in-class reported error rate sits below 1%. Industry reporting commonly puts 3% to 5% as ordinary. Be skeptical of anyone who cannot give you a figure at all — it usually means no one is measuring.
Then ask the follow-up questions: how is the rate calculated, per order or per unit? Does it include errors caught internally before shipping, or only the ones customers reported? We wrote a whole piece on what an error rate really means, because the number on its own can mislead in both directions.
2. Insist on pricing transparency
3PL pricing is genuinely hard to compare, because every provider structures fees differently. Receiving, storage, pick-and-pack, packaging materials and postage can each be billed in ways that make the headline number look low while the real per-order cost is higher.
A trustworthy partner will walk you through the full picture, tell you which line items are included and which are extra, and price your actual order profile rather than a generic average. Ask directly whether you are billed the discounted carrier rate or a marked-up one — that single answer moves more money than the pick fee does.
See 3PL pricing explained for a fee-by-fee breakdown, and how our pricing works for what we do and do not bill for.
3. Confirm they support your channels and your category
Make sure the 3PL handles the way you actually sell:
- Sales channels: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Amazon (including FBA prep), Walmart, TikTok Shop, and EDI or portal-based retail accounts if you sell wholesale.
- Order types: single-item DTC, multi-item, subscription boxes, case and pallet wholesale. Each has a different labor profile.
- Product category: this is the one people skip. Apparel, beauty, supplements, shelf-stable food and general merchandise each carry their own handling, compliance and packaging requirements.
Category fit is where a good-looking 3PL quietly fails. If you sell food, supplements or organic product, ask whether the facility is FDA-registered and how it is registered at the state level. If you sell aerosols — dry shampoo, setting spray — ask whether they can handle ORM-D hazmat at all. Plenty cannot. (We can: see compliance and registrations.)
4. Evaluate customer service — theirs and yours
Two kinds matter. First, how responsive is the 3PL to you when something goes wrong at 4pm on a Friday? Is there a named person, or an inbox that swallows things?
Second, can they support your customers? Some 3PLs, us included, run an in-house customer service team that can answer your shoppers' email and phone questions under your brand's name. For a lean team that is a meaningful amount of work off your plate, and the people answering are standing next to the inventory they are answering about.
5. Look for a partner, not a vendor
This is the hardest one to score on a spreadsheet, and it is usually the one that decides whether the relationship lasts. The question is what happens outside the contract. When you need a rush overnight, an unusual insert, a retailer routing guide deciphered at short notice, a pallet reconfigured the day before a truck — does the answer start with "sure, let us look at it" or with "that is not in scope"?
Some practical tests: ask to speak to the person who would actually run your account, not just the salesperson. Ask what they would do if a launch went 5x over forecast. Ask what they have told a client they were wrong about recently. And visit the warehouse if you can — ten minutes on a floor tells you more than a deck will.
A short due-diligence checklist
- Reported order accuracy rate, and how it is calculated
- On-time ship performance and the same-day cutoff time
- Full itemized pricing against your order profile, not an average
- Whether postage is passed through at the discounted rate
- Integrations for every channel you sell on today, plus the next one
- Category handling: FDA and state registrations, hazmat, lot capture if you need it
- Inventory insurance limits, and what happens if something is damaged or lost
- Who answers when something breaks, and how fast
- Contract length, minimums, and what it takes to leave
That last one matters more than people expect. Ask what offboarding looks like before you sign. A partner confident in the work will tell you plainly. We do not use long-term contracts or hard minimums, which means we have to earn the account every month.
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