Imagine starting a business with nothing but a great idea and a lot of spreadsheets. That’s exactly what happened when we founded fulfillmate. We were printing shipping labels by hand, fulfilling a few hundred orders a week. It worked well—until it didn't.
Today, fulfillmate is an international third-party logistics (3PL) provider offering warehouse logistics and freight forwarding. Originally from Australia, my co-founder Steve Tabacchiera and I started fulfillmate in Southern California, where we’ve found a niche in helping international brands enter the US market. We primarily serve ecommerce businesses, supporting companies with warehousing, order fulfillment and processing, and shipping orders from online retailers and Shopify direct sales.
Falling short of client expectations
When someone purchases from one of our clients, they expect shipping to be fast and low cost. The more warehouses we offer, the closer we are to the end customer, cutting costs for our clients and speeding up the package’s arrival. But when we first launched the company in 2019, our operations felt like a slow crawl compared to the pace of the ecommerce world.
Initially, a single site handled a few hundred orders per week, and we relied on spreadsheets and printed shipping labels to fulfill those orders. Before long, our orders jumped from hundreds to thousands, and when we opened a new warehouse on the East Coast and then Australia, the situation became untenable.
We began handling over 15,000 orders weekly from multiple locations. As you go from a warehouse of a few hundred feet to a few thousand feet to multiple thousands of feet, you need more controls. We needed a unified system to locate pallets easily because sending someone out to find a specific product is impossible.
Our manual processes couldn’t keep pace with clients’ expectations or our company’s growth. We wanted our clients to have a better experience, especially around billing and order visibility. We knew we needed a solution to match our ambition and evolving logistics needs.
An automated and efficient way to ship
We found a great fit in Extensiv. The first steps were adopting 3PL Warehouse Manager and Integration Manager to begin automating and simplifying our online orders. But as we opened more locations, we faced more complex situations. Clients wanted to hold stock at both our San Diego and Charleston warehouses and automate the flow of orders, for example, and we couldn’t manage those scenarios with our existing system. We also began to consider working with other 3PLs to expand our international network, but we lacked an easy way to send orders to these partners or provide visibility to clients.
That’s when Extensiv introduced us to Network Manager, which revolutionized our multi-site logistics strategy.
Network Manager enables us to easily coordinate logistics between warehouses on the other side of the country—or the other side of the world. It starts with shopping cart integrations that send orders directly to Network Manager. Network Manager then uses rules to push an order to the warehouse that makes the most sense according to stock, location, or any other factor we choose. For a client with stock in multiple locations, these rules ensure maximum delivery speed and cost-efficiency.
Where we used to have multiple systems managing each stage of the process in our warehouse, Network Manager pulls it all together: from scanning to pick-and-pack to order dispatch.
Network Manager even helps with problems we didn’t realize were solvable, like the operational headaches around correcting a customer’s order. Clients can see out-of-stock items or resolve issues such as incorrect addresses in Network Manager before the order even reaches our warehouse. As a result, the number of instances where we have to manually fix an order at the warehouse has dropped dramatically. The time saved allows us to focus on more value-added activities.
Changing the landscape of network expansion
The most significant impact of Network Manager has been the ability to grow our network without incurring heavy costs. Before, if a client wanted to ship outside the US or Australia, we’d have to say no or refer them to another 3PL. But building a new warehouse ourselves is a big undertaking. Extending our reach would mean entering regions where we had no expertise or infrastructure, and it’s cost-prohibitive even before obtaining all the resources needed to do business in a different country.
Using Network Manager, we could partner with international 3PLs and easily integrate warehouses into our network, allowing us to quote more work and open doors to new clients.
Extensiv changed the conversation entirely. Using Network Manager, we could partner with international 3PLs and easily integrate those warehouses into our network, allowing us to quote more work and open doors to new clients. Within 18 months, fulfillmate’s order volume from existing clients increased by more than 10%.
We knew we’d found the right partner when discussions with Extensiv evolved beyond the seamless connections of warehouses to leveraging one another’s business to achieve greater success. Using Extensiv, we avoided a massive capital investment and saw a quick return. Accessing sites in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the EU has allowed us to tap into new markets, grow our client list, and develop specialized services around exporting to the US.
Empowering customers fuels greater growth
We couldn’t have continued to scale so quickly and offer a wider array of services without Extensiv. Now, clients receive the same great experience whether they ship from Charleston, Leeds, Vancouver, or Sydney. Having a single, easy-to-use portal where they can see and manage everything makes an opaque process more transparent and puts the power back in their hands.
Extensiv’s support and shared vision has enabled us to grow much faster than we ever could on our own, without sacrificing quality or control.
Extensiv’s support and shared vision has enabled us to grow much faster than we ever could on our own without sacrificing quality or control. More than just a software provider, Extensiv is a true partner in fulfillmate’s growth story.
About the Author: Ben Carman
Ben Carman is the Co-Founder at fulfillmate, focusing on on systems and operations. He holds a degree in supply chain management and Masters degree in Business. His career background is across senior level global supply chain roles with international warehousing, logistics, retail and manufacturing businesses.
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