Selecting and contracting a fulfilment provider

Fit is judged on order profile, not floor area

Ask what proportion of the provider's existing work resembles yours in units per order, product size, storage type, channel mix and seasonality. A provider whose site is engineered around full-pallet despatch will quote for single-item picking, but its layout, equipment and labour model were designed for a different problem. Existing clients of a similar shape are the strongest evidence, and reluctance to name any of them is itself informative.

Capacity rights, and the peak conversation

Space and labour are finite, and a provider signing several growing clients is selling the same headroom more than once. Useful protections include a stated allocation of storage, a notice mechanism for increasing it, priority arrangements for the busiest trading period, and an obligation to warn when the site approaches its limits. Clients who never ask are relying on the provider's judgement about whose growth to accommodate.

Who the customer thinks they are dealing with

Packaging, inserts, despatch notes, carrier labels and the name on the return address all reach the buyer, and the provider controls them day to day. Agree who supplies branded materials, who holds the stock of them, what happens when they run out, and whether the provider may substitute. The same applies to the carrier services offered at checkout, because a provider's carrier relationships shape the choices a shopper is given.

References that reveal contract behaviour

Operational references tell you whether orders go out; commercial references tell you how the provider behaves when something changes. Ask other clients how a scope change was priced, how a peak overrun was handled, how quickly invoices were corrected when queried, and what happened during the last system upgrade. Behaviour under pressure is a better predictor of the coming years than a tour of a tidy site.

Frequently asked questions

Should a growing brand pick a provider larger than it needs?

Headroom helps, but a small client inside a very large provider can struggle for attention when priorities are set. What matters more is where you sit in the provider's client mix: being a meaningful account at a mid-sized operator often produces better responsiveness than being a rounding error at a large one.

How much should sit in the agreement rather than in email?

Anything you would want to rely on when the original contacts have moved on: storage allocation, peak arrangements, the definition of a chargeable order, packaging supply and the process for changing any of them. Verbal understandings survive exactly as long as the people who made them.

Is a trial period useful before full commitment?

Yes, provided it tests the parts that are hard to reverse: systems integration, returns handling and a genuine volume peak. A trial that only proves a provider can pick a low volume of simple orders confirms very little.