You are about to hand another company your inventory, your shipping cost line and the last thing your customer touches before they decide whether to buy from you again. Most brands make that decision off a warehouse tour and a rate sheet.
This is the list of questions to ask a 3PL before you sign. A 3PL, if you have not had to define it yet, is a third-party logistics provider: an outside company that stores your inventory, picks and packs your orders and hands them to carriers. Fifteen questions, each with what a good answer sounds like and what a bad one is covering for.
We are an owner-operated 3PL in Southern California. We wrote this knowing you will point it straight back at us. That is the point.
How to actually use this list
Ask these on a call, not over email. You are testing whether the person can answer without looking something up, because that tells you whether they run the floor or sell for the people who do.
Write the answers down verbatim while you are on the call. A week later you will remember tone and forget numbers, and the numbers are the comparison.
People and accountability
1. Who do I call at 4pm on a Friday, and what is that person’s name?
This is the single most predictive question on the list. Fulfillment does not break on Tuesday morning. It breaks when a Shopify order fires with a bad address on a Friday afternoon and 40 units have to be pulled before the trailer leaves.
Good answer: a first name, a direct number and the hours that number is staffed. Ours is Monday to Saturday, 8am to 6pm Pacific, on (949) 468-7759.
Bad answer: “submit a ticket and our team responds within one business day.” That is not support. That is a queue with a service level attached to it.
2. Is the person quoting me the person who will run my account?
Salespeople make commitments that operations never hears about. The cutoff you were promised, the special handling on your fragile SKU, the fact that your subscription boxes ship on the 3rd of the month: all of it lives in a proposal document that the floor never reads.
Good answer: the same person, or a warm handoff on a call you are on.
Bad answer: “you will be assigned an onboarding specialist after signature.” Ask who that is by name before you sign, not after.
3. Can I walk the building that will actually hold my inventory?
Not the headquarters. Not the flagship site. The building your pallets will sit in. Ask for the street address and go stand in it.
Good answer: a date and an address. Ours are Jurupa Valley, Lake Forest, Commerce and Perris, and you can drive to any of them.
Bad answer: anything that routes you to a corporate office, or a network of “partner facilities” they will not name. If they will not tell you which building holds your goods, you cannot audit them and neither can your insurer.
Operations
4. What is the order cutoff, and what happens to an order placed five minutes after it?
Every 3PL publishes a cutoff. Very few will tell you what happens on the wrong side of it.
Good answer: a time, a time zone and a rule for the overflow. Orders that reach us before 2pm Pacific ship the same business day. Orders after it ship the next business day, and we say so rather than letting you find out from a customer.
Bad answer: “same-day shipping” with no time attached, or a cutoff that is quietly different in November and December. Ask directly whether the cutoff moves during peak.
5. What happens to my inbound container, and when do I get a receiving report?
Receiving is where money quietly leaks. Units counted wrong on the dock stay wrong for months, and every cycle count after that inherits the error.
Good answer: a described process. Physical inspection, barcode scanning, entry into their warehouse management system, and a receiving report the same day the freight is unloaded. Ask how many days out you need to book an inbound appointment, and what happens if your container clears the port early.
Bad answer: “we will let you know when it is checked in.” Put a number on it or you have agreed to nothing.
6. How do you measure order accuracy, and what is the denominator?
Accuracy is the most gamed metric in this industry. A 99.9% figure means one thing measured per line item and something very different measured per shipment, and nobody volunteers which they used.
Good answer: the number, the denominator and how errors get counted. We hold 99%+ order accuracy and we count an error as any order that leaves with the wrong item, the wrong quantity or the wrong label.
Bad answer: a number with no unit behind it. Also treat a claimed 99.99% with suspicion. Nobody running human pick paths at volume is at four nines, and a provider willing to say it is a provider willing to say other things.
7. How often do you cycle count, and who pays for a variance?
Cycle counting means counting a slice of the inventory continuously rather than shutting down once a year for a full physical count.
Good answer: a cadence, a method and a written shrink policy. Ask what happens when the count comes up 12 units short on a SKU that retails at $60.
Bad answer: “our system tracks everything in real time.” Software does not count. People count, and software records what they say.
8. If I sell on Amazon, what is your poly bag spec?
This one is a lie detector. Any provider genuinely doing FBA prep answers it in one breath, because they buy the bags.
Amazon’s published requirements for poly-bagged units are a minimum thickness of 1.5 mil, a transparent bag, a fully sealed bag, no more than 3 inches of bag protruding past the product dimensions, and a suffocation warning on any bag with an opening of 5 inches or more measured flat. Bags that miss the spec get re-bagged at the fulfillment center at your cost, or the shipment gets refused. Confirm the current spec in Seller Central before you commit, because Amazon revises it.
Good answer: the thickness, the 5-inch threshold and how they handle FNSKU labels, which are the Amazon-specific barcodes that tie a unit to your seller account. That is the level our Amazon FBA prep floor works at.
Bad answer: “we handle all Amazon requirements.” They do not know the spec.
Money
9. Is there a monthly minimum, and how is it billed?
Minimums are not a problem. Undisclosed minimums are.
Good answer: the number and the mechanism, before signature. We invoice a $500 per month minimum and bill the difference if your charges land under it. You will find that stated on our pricing page rather than in a schedule attached to the contract.
Bad answer: “we can talk about minimums later.” Later means after you have moved your inventory.
10. Can I see a real invoice at my volume, with the client name removed?
A rate card is a list of prices. An invoice is what those prices become once real orders run through them, including the lines nobody quoted you.
Good answer: they walk you through one line by line. If they cannot show a real one, ask them to build a mock invoice from your actual last month of order data.
Bad answer: a rate card and a shrug. The gap between the two is where the surprises live, and we wrote about the fees that appear after you sign because that gap is the most common reason brands leave a provider inside a year.
11. Do I pay for storage positions I am not using?
Some providers bill reserved space. Some bill occupied space. The difference on a seasonal brand that holds 400 pallets in October and 90 in February is not small.
Good answer: a stated unit, bin, shelf or pallet position, and a clear rule. We bill space in use. Empty positions are not charged.
Bad answer: a monthly space commitment with no release mechanism, or a storage rate escalator buried in the term sheet.
12. Whose carrier account do my parcels ship on, and do I see the real carrier charge?
Providers buy parcel at negotiated rates and pass them through. Some pass through at cost. Some add a margin and call the total “shipping.”
Good answer: they tell you which model they use without hesitating, and they will show you the carrier invoice next to your invoice. Ask which dimensional weight divisor applies to your account. Dimensional weight, or DIM, means you get billed on the size of the box rather than what it weighs, and it decides your parcel cost more than anything else you control.
Bad answer: a flat blended shipping rate with no visibility. That can genuinely be the cheaper option at low volume, but you should choose it knowingly rather than discover it.
When it goes wrong
13. What happens when you ship the wrong item?
Not if. Every operation ships wrong items. What separates providers is who pays for the re-ship, the return label and the customer’s patience.
Good answer: a written remedy. We own our errors at no cost to you, which means we re-ship correctly and absorb the freight both directions.
Bad answer: “we will investigate and credit where appropriate.” Ask for the policy in writing and read who decides what is appropriate.
14. What does the contract cap your liability at if my inventory is lost or damaged?
First-time outsourcers almost never ask this, and it carries the largest number on the list.
Under Article 7 of the Uniform Commercial Code, a warehouse may limit what it owes you for loss or damage through a term in the storage agreement, and that limit holds as long as the warehouse is not converting your goods to its own use (UCC 7-204). Insurance guidance on warehouse legal liability describes caps commonly written between $0.15 and $3.00 per pound, or five to ten times the monthly storage charge, whichever is less (Amwins client advisory).
Do that math on your product. A 4 ounce serum weighs a quarter pound. At a $0.50 per pound cap, a lost unit retailing at $42 pays you 13 cents.
Good answer: they know their cap, they say it out loud, and they tell you to carry your own cargo or stock-throughput insurance to cover the gap.
Bad answer: “we are fully insured.” Their insurance covers their liability, and their liability is capped by the contract you are about to sign. Have your own counsel or broker read the clause. This is not legal advice and we are not qualified to give it.
15. What is the notice period, and what does it cost me to leave?
Read the exit before you read the onboarding.
Good answer: a stated notice period, no exit fee, and a described process for releasing your inventory. Ask specifically whether they will hold goods against a disputed invoice.
Bad answer: an auto-renew with a 90-day notice window that opens 120 days before the anniversary. That is a design, not an accident.
Three more if you ship freight or import
Who is the contracting party on the bill of lading?
If your provider arranges your LTL, less-than-truckload freight that shares a trailer with other shippers, find out whether they are the broker of record or handing you to one. You can check any MC or USDOT number free on the FMCSA’s public SAFER Company Snapshot and confirm the authority is active.
What happens if my container arrives two weeks early?
Ports do not consult your storage plan. Ask about drayage and demurrage exposure, and whether they have floor space for an unplanned 40-footer.
Who files the claim when freight arrives damaged?
Ask who photographs the pallet on the dock, who notes the exception on the delivery receipt and how many days you have to file. Concealed damage windows are short and they get missed.
Questions that sound smart and tell you nothing
How many square feet do you have?
Square footage says nothing about whether they have space for you, or racking that fits your product. Ask about available pallet positions in your product profile instead.
Do you have a WMS?
Everyone says yes. Ask instead what happens in the system when a picker scans a unit that is not on the order.
Can you scale with us?
Every provider says yes and nobody prices it. Ask what your rate does at three times your current volume, and get it in writing.
How long have you been in business?
Useful context, not a differentiator. We started in 2016 and grew from 35,000 square feet to more than 100,000 across four Southern California buildings. That tells you we have lasted. It does not tell you we are right for you.
Where we would score badly on our own list
We would rather you hear this from us than find it at question 10 on a call.
We have no published case studies or testimonials.
A prospect comparing three providers should weigh that against us, and we would not blame you for doing it. Ask us for references directly and we will tell you honestly who we can put you in touch with.
We will not send you a rate card.
We do not publish flat rates because pricing moves on volume, product size and handling, and a card that ignores those is a card that gets revised after you sign. What we will do is send a full line-item proposal inside 24 hours. If you want to compare five providers on a spreadsheet without talking to anyone, we are the wrong stop.
We are a California operation.
If your customers are concentrated in the Northeast and next-day delivery to them is the thing your brand competes on, a national provider with East Coast nodes will beat us on transit time. That is not a close call and we will say so on the first call rather than the third.
Our $500 monthly minimum makes us wrong for small shippers.
If you are running 40 orders a month with no near-term growth, the minimum will cost you more than the fulfillment does. Stay where you are and call us when volume gets there.
We are not set up for cold-chain or hazmat.
If your product needs temperature control or hazmat handling, you need a specialist, and it is not us.
What to do next
Take these fifteen questions into every call you have booked, including ours. The provider who answers them with numbers instead of adjectives is the one to shortlist, and if that is not us on the day, you will still have run a better evaluation than most brands ever do.
If you want to run the list against us, start the conversation. Fifteen minutes on a call is enough to size your volume, your SKU count and where your customers are, and you will have a full line-item proposal back inside 24 hours.