Moving to a new 3PL is a divorce and a marriage happening at the same time. Done wrong, you go dark for weeks. Done right, your customers never notice anything happened.
Exit the old 3PL without holding hostages or paying ransom. Plan your exit around your season, your launch calendar, and inbound shipments already in route. Start with your slowest-moving, lowest-risk inventory first — lowest risk, lowest downside if something goes wrong.
Stand up the new 3PL before you actually need it. Send early inventory so they can scan it, put it away, and understand your product. Bring packing materials in ahead of time. Find every problem before you’re live — not after your first big order drops.
Run both locations simultaneously. You are two companies at once — two WMS instances, two ERP connections, two sets of carrier accounts. Slowly turn one down as your confidence in the new one goes up. Then push the rest over in one clean move.
Your old 3PL says it’ll take forever. Your new 3PL says a week. Both are wrong. The truth: some SKUs sit in both warehouses simultaneously. Inbound shipments divert before the old facility is closed. You ship from two locations on overlapping dates.
There is a moment — sometimes just a few days — where you flip the majority of volume to the new facility. Everything before that moment is preparation. Everything after is cleanup. Get the overlap wrong and you’ll have stockouts, missed SLAs, and a 3PL relationship that starts underwater before it ever had a chance.
The goal is that your customers never notice anything happened.
The exit is about minimizing what you leave behind and minimizing what you owe. Plan it carefully. Rush it and you’ll pay for it — literally.
Work with your marketing, product, and leadership teams to identify what can be sold at discount, donated, or destroyed. TJ Maxx, Marshalls, liquidation platforms — exhaust every option. Every pallet you don’t have to move is money saved and complexity eliminated.
Everyone wants to move the fastest SKUs first. Do the opposite. Move your slowest, lowest-risk inventory first. It gives the new 3PL time to learn your product without the pressure of high-velocity fulfillment. If something goes wrong, the stakes are lower.
Your contract has termination clauses. Read them. There may be notice periods, minimum fees, or storage obligations you can negotiate down. Your 3PL wants to fill that space — use that as leverage to get out cleanly and at the lowest cost.
Never start a 3PL transition during peak season, around a major product launch, or when large inbound shipments are already in transit. Time your exit for a slow period with maximum lead time on both sides.
Identify every open PO, every shipment in transit, every container on the water. Update routing instructions with suppliers before the old facility closes. Know exactly which shipments land where and when.
Before you transfer, reconcile every SKU. Request a full inventory report from your current 3PL and audit it. Discrepancies are much harder to resolve after you’ve left than while you’re still there.
Everything on this list needs to be done — signed, confirmed, tested — before a single order ships from the new facility.
Exit agreement with the old 3PL. New 3PL master services agreement. Any termination fees negotiated and documented. No assumptions — everything in writing before you move a single pallet.
Destruction and liquidation vendors. New WMS license or registration. ERP integration agreements. EDI contracts with retail partners. Every downstream dependency needs its own signed agreement.
Order flows from your eCommerce platform to the WMS and back. EDI 850/856/810 cycles with your retail partners. Carrier label generation. Returns processing. Test everything before you’re live.
Every SKU in the new WMS with accurate dimensions, weights, UPCs, and outer case codes. No duplicate item numbers. No missing barcodes. The 3PL can’t receive what they can’t scan.
Get your cartons, dunnage, tape, and labels into the new facility before you need them. This lets the 3PL validate pack-out procedures and catch pricing assumptions before they become billing surprises.
A pallet of slow-moving product sent weeks before go-live teaches the new 3PL more about your operation than any kickoff meeting. Let them receive it, put it away, scan it, and tell you what they see.
The single biggest mistake in 3PL transitions is treating it like a cutover — shut one off, turn the other on. That is not how it works. You will run two locations, sometimes for weeks. That means two WMS instances active, two connections to your ERP, two sets of carrier accounts, two receiving teams, two sets of SLAs to manage.
Start with your slowest-moving, lowest-risk inventory. Move it early. Let the new 3PL get familiar with your product, your systems, and your pack-out before the volume pressure is on. Then migrate your faster-moving SKUs as confidence builds. The moment you’re certain the new facility can handle the load — push the rest and close out the old.
The first 90 days make or break the relationship. The decisions you make in those 90 days — the processes you set up, the KPIs you establish, the communication cadence you build — define how this relationship performs for years.
Going live is not the finish line. It’s the starting gun. Here’s what needs to happen in the first 90 days to make the relationship work.
Weekly operational calls in the first 90 days. Review order accuracy, receiving turnaround, SLA performance, and any open issues. Don’t wait for problems to escalate — build the cadence before you need it.
Order accuracy, on-time shipment, receiving cycle time, return processing time — measure from day one. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and you can’t hold anyone accountable without a baseline.
Every process, every exception, every workaround. If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist. The first 90 days is when institutional knowledge gets built — or lost.
If your first 90 days includes or leads into peak season, simulate high-volume scenarios before they happen. Run a mock sale. Send a test wave of orders. Find the breaking points before your customers do.
The first invoice from a new 3PL almost always has surprises. Review it line by line. Resolve discrepancies immediately — not months later when they’ve compounded. Establish the billing baseline in month one.
Visit the facility. Meet the ops team. Know your account manager’s manager. The 3PL relationships that work long-term are the ones where both sides feel invested. That starts in the first 90 days.
I’ve run dozens of 3PL transitions from start to finish. I build the project plan, manage the timeline, coordinate the teams, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks on either side.
A free 30-minute call. Tell me where you are in the process and I’ll tell you what I’d be worried about right now.
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