{"id":1519,"date":"2020-01-27T20:34:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-27T20:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shipbob.com\/au\/blog\/choose-order-fulfillment-center-location-outsourcing-3pl\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T15:56:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T15:56:16","slug":"choose-order-fulfillment-center-location-outsourcing-3pl","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.shipbob.com\/au\/blog\/choose-order-fulfillment-center-location-outsourcing-3pl\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Choose the Best Location of a Fulfilment Centre When You Outsource to a 3PL"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Table of Contents<\/p>

** Minutes<\/p><\/div><\/div>\n

How do you choose the best location of an order fulfilment centre?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you need to be located close to your 3PL\u2019s fulfilment centre?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When should you use more than one fulfilment centre?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How ShipBob helps you choose a fulfilment centre location<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Request a quote from ShipBob<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

What do you want to learn?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to Choose a Fulfilment Location<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Request Fulfilment Pricing from ShipBob<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n

There are many questions you should ask when evaluating potential third-party logistics (3PL<\/a>) providers. Aside from aspects such as pricing and ecommerce store integrations, another very important consideration is location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where are their fulfilment centres? Do they have multiple locations?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While these questions might seem straightforward, their answers have implications you must think through. The reality is the location of a fulfilment centre has a major impact on shipping costs and can be either a barrier to or enabler of scalability for ecommerce brands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read on to learn how geography affects your order fulfilment<\/a> strategy, and gain tips to make the best decision for your business.
<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do you choose the best location of an order fulfilment centre?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The biggest factor in choosing a fulfilment centre<\/a> location comes down to one question: Where are your customers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is because shipping couriers use shipping zones<\/a> to calculate rates for services. Shipping zones are the geographical areas that couriers ship to, which measure the distance a package travels from the point of origin to the destination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way zones work, the less distance a package travels, the quicker it gets delivered to your customer and the less money you have to pay for shipping. And the more you sell, the more time and money you\u2019ll save over time compared to orders that have to travel a farther distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today\u2019s consumers not only crave convenience and speed with deliveries, but also expect it. Being near the majority of customers, or located near major hubs or metro areas that can reach large volumes of customers, will help ensure shoppers get the quickest turnaround time possible, helping you get closer to offering free 2-day shipping<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you need to be located close to your 3PL\u2019s fulfilment centre?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

No, being near your 3PL<\/a> is not a requirement (though there is nothing wrong with it). In other words, if you\u2019re an Atlanta-based ecommerce merchant, your fulfilment centre does not need to be in Atlanta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, another consideration is whether you should choose a fulfilment centre that is close to your manufacturing plant. Though it may cost less money to ship your products to the 3PL from the manufacturer when they are nearby, this isn\u2019t how you should make your decision.
<\/a>\nFor products that are manufactured overseas, it\u2019s unlikely that the majority of your customer base is all that close to the manufacturer. Importing to a coastal city or port city is an added bonus when inventory is coming from across the ocean, but should not be the only factor in making a decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When should you use more than one fulfilment centre?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When you are first getting started, working with a single warehouse<\/a> may be all you need or that makes sense until you reach a certain scale. As you grow, you may need to send inventory to other strategically located fulfilment centres (or distribution centres<\/a>). This concept, known as distributed inventory, has become a game changer for ecommerce merchants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"How<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Splitting inventory across warehouses has several benefits, especially as many online shoppers expect two-day delivery<\/a>. You can choose to send only certain SKUs (e.g., the most popular or highest selling products) to certain fulfilment centres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If one fulfilment centre ever runs out of a product, you still have the others to serve as backups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Distributing inventory across fulfilment centres doesn\u2019t mean using multiple 3PLs. Choosing a single 3PL with multiple locations will help unify systems, technologies, and communication. This helps ensure greater accuracy, transparency, and consistency in service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key to understanding when and where to send inventory is to continuously analyse your order data. This includes paying attention to any geographic shifts and growth. You must let the data guide your decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cPartnering with ShipBob, we joined their<\/em> Inventory Placement Program<\/a>, which helps us distribute our inventory to strategic hubs across the US so we don\u2019t have to manage multi-location inbound shipments or identify the most optimal fulfilment centre locations ourselves. This finally gave us the visibility and analytics we were looking for. Through the program, we get real-time insight into how much inventory to allocate to a specific warehouse, our current on-hand inventory levels, and how long each SKU is going to last by location. ShipBob provides a lot of distribution metrics, and everything presented is useful.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Mithu Kuna, Founder and CEO of <\/em>Baby Doppler<\/em><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

How ShipBob helps you choose a fulfilment centre location<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Outsourcing fulfilment<\/a> to ShipBob means you get access to our network of fulfilment centres, best-in-class technology, and more data than you\u2019ve ever had about your inventory, orders, and customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n