Hi everyone. I started a shop last fall and have been using a 3p fulfillment company in LA (they also have a location in Houston).
It's been a disaster. would like suggestions on how to deal with the situation. examples of the larger issues:
1. Bad system setup - billed shipping based on Houston origination when shipping from LA - this continued for multiple months after we bought up the issue the week we started. a significant percentage of our customers are LA/California/West coast.
2. Inaccurate label cost. Showing an $8 shipping label cost on the initial invoice then came back a few months later with a new label cost of $25
3. inflated shipping cost due to packaging. for the exact same content, used different packaging that resulted in a shipping weight of 1.6lb, 2.2lb and 2.6lb, all within the same week. (as you may know, the shipping cost of 2.6lb is 10-40% higher depending on the distance.)
4. inflated shipping cost due to packaging. shipped 0.3cubic ft/3lbs of product in a (18x14x12) 3,000 2 cubic ft box that resulted in a $58 shipping charge, as opposed to shipping the same content in a more reasonable 12x12x12 1cubic ft box that would result in a shipping charge $13 . There are many many instances.
5. bad carrier setup - told us that the system is automatically selecting the lowest between fedex ground and USPS from the start while the fedex was not properly enabled until more than 4 months later.
6. fulfillment errors - a significant % of wrong item/quantity shipments resulted in many reshipments. no error rate tracking.
7. no contact - originally, I was given the phone number of the LA manager and an associate who works on my shipments. both got fired and they wouldn't provide any new phone number.
8. don't care about customers - by this point, we only have the phone number of the sales guy who sold us the service. He doesn't answer/call back most times.
At times we considered switching to a different provider but between their promise of things will get much better and the logistics/cost of switching, we haven't made the move. Now we are just ramping down this segment of the business.
It's extremely embarrassing to admit that I have worked on the tech/business side of some top e-commerce companies in the past and I have even spent days in fulfillment centers to understand the processes. When I selected this company, it didn't cross my mind how they can mess up our simple 10sku business so much. I could have hired a part-time person and a storage space to do the fulfillment ourselves much more efficiently.
Overall, we shipped about 2300 orders over several months and they invoiced about $30K. $6-8K of that could have been easily avoided if the operation is managed professionally. Of course, the biggest cost is probably the missed business opportunity. Their poor performance (fulfillment errors resulted in many angry customers, and missing SLA) poisoned our relationship with our promotion partners as these partners were getting complaints from customers due to fulfillment issues. also, we spent so much time working with them to get fulfillment right that distracted from marketing development.
At this point, other than getting out, anyone has any suggestions on dealing with the situation?
Thanks!
