Your inventory, in partner buildings, on your numbers.
Not square footage for rent — an operated service: receiving, storage, picking, packing, shipping and returns, billed by the pallet and the touch instead of the lease.
Orders in the WMS before the daily cut-off ship the same day — waved, picked, packed and manifested before the last trailer leaves the dock.
3PL warehousing is the outsourcing of storage, inventory management and order fulfillment to a third-party logistics provider— your product lives in a partner distribution center we book and manage, its team receives it, stores it, picks it, packs it and ships it, and the warehouse management system keeps your ERP told the truth about every unit in real time. Instead of signing a lease, hiring a warehouse crew, buying racking and licensing a WMS, you buy the outcome: pallets stored, orders out the door before cut-off, inventory accuracy you can audit. Pricing follows activity — storage per pallet per month, handling per touch, value-added work per unit — so the warehouse line on your P&L scales with your sales instead of sitting there as fixed overhead.
Qeep works with partner warehouses we use regularly, with more space available when volume calls for it. The right building depends on the freight. There are six space types to choose between — ambient, bonded, Foreign Trade Zone, food-grade, GMP and temperature-controlled — because a pallet of imported electronics, a lot-controlled ingredient and a quarantined pharmaceutical batch are three different compliance problems wearing the same shrink-wrap.
Multi-client vs dedicated warehousing
In a multi-client warehouse, several brands share one building, one labor pool and one WMS — fixed costs are spread, peak labor flexes across accounts, and you can start with a single bay and a few hundred SKUs. A dedicated warehouse runs exclusively for you: your racking profile, your processes, your SLAs — at a fixed cost that typically only makes sense above roughly 50,000 square feet of steady demand. The honest 3PL answer is that most brands belong in multi-client space far longer than their pride suggests, and the right provider makes graduating to dedicated space a slotting exercise, not a re-platforming project.
Why near-port positioning matters
Distance from the port is money in three currencies. Drayage: a container dray from terminal to a warehouse 20 miles away costs a fraction of one hauled 200 miles inland — and turns the chassis back before per-diem starts. Time: port-adjacent receiving puts inbound stock sellable days earlier, which is the whole game in produce seasons and product launches. Duty: bonded and FTZ space only pays off when the goods can move port-to-zone without detouring through customs territory — which is exactly why bonded and FTZ space is worth booking at the gateway rather than in the middle of the map.
What a WMS-integrated 3PL actually does
“WMS-integrated” means your systems and the warehouse’s stop emailing spreadsheets at each other. Orders arrive as EDI 940s or through the warehouse portal, inbound shipments are matched against ASNs, and shipping confirmations come back as 945s with carrier and tracking. How much of that a given building supports varies, which is why Qeep agrees the reporting with you before the first pallet arrives rather than promising one system everywhere.
