Fast, reliable ecommerce fulfillment is essential to satisfying and retaining shoppers in today’s increasingly competitive online marketplace. As you scale your business, ensuring you have the right ecommerce fulfillment services support can sometimes make or break your growth.
For customers, a seamless online shopping experience—from checkout to delivery—is non-negotiable. A recent study revealed that nearly a third of consumers rank fast delivery as their top priority when choosing a retailer, while a quarter of shoppers would hesitate to buy from a retailer after a mishandled shipping issue.
If merchants want to build consumer trust and loyalty, an optimized ecommerce fulfillment process is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s a must.
While some businesses handle the fulfillment process in-house, many choose to engage a third-party logistics (3PL) service—like Amazon Multichannel Fulfillment (MCF), part of Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS), Amazon’s 3PL offering and end-to-end logistics solution that can provide the experience and expertise crucial to navigating this complex space.
In this blog, we will explore three main steps in the ecommerce fulfillment process—picking, packing, and shipping—and discuss how a 3PL can provide retail fulfillment services to help you optimize your processes.
Picking
Core to ecommerce fulfillment services is picking, the process of locating and retrieving a product that’s been ordered from the warehouse or fulfillment center. After an online purchase has been made, the order is sent to a warehouse where that item is “picked” from a shelf and transported to an order packing station. Picking is the first step in the order fulfillment cycle, so any mistakes or delays here can disrupt the rest of the fulfillment process.
Problems in the “picking” phase of the order fulfillment process can arise if items are not properly stored or mislabeled. Moreover, a fast and efficient picking process relies on combining adequate staffing with new technologies to keep up with the pace of incoming orders.
A 3PL service can help optimize the picking process by:
- Implementing an effective warehouse slotting strategy, which is a process to optimally organize and position inventory in the warehouse or fulfillment center to minimize picking times
- Utilizing a robust warehouse management system (WMS) to enable rapid and accurate inventory tracking and effective management of warehouse operations
- Deploying state-of-the-art automation technology, such as warehouse robotics and conveyor belt systems, to optimize the speed and accuracy of the picking process
Packing
Once an item has been picked and delivered to the packing station in the warehouse or fulfillment center, it’s ready to be prepared for shipment.
The packing process in ecommerce fulfillment involves several steps. First, the right packaging (box, envelope, bag, etc.) for the item must be selected in order to reduce the risk of damage during shipment and minimize the size and weight of the parcel (and the cost of shipping it). After the item is packed by a warehouse employee or a machine, the package is typically weighed, a shipping label is applied, and then it’s sent on its way to the outbound dock.
The same technological and organizational capabilities that a 3PL uses to improve picking also apply to packing. A 3PL service provides continuous quality checks: When an item travels from the picking to the packing stage, it must first pass a thorough examination that checks for damage and inaccuracies. In addition, some 3PL services—like MCF—are constantly innovating to add new automation into the packing process. The goal of these cutting-edge innovations is to improve the effectiveness of the packing process and ensure products are properly packed and labeled for shipment.
Shipping
Once an order is picked and packed, it’s ready to be shipped to the customer’s doorstep. Shoppers today demand fast, free shipping: 90% expect 2- or 3-day shipping to be standard, and are likely to abandon shopping carts if they see high shipping costs.
Ecommerce fulfillment services aim to meet these expectations but often struggle as they need to rely on carriers for shipment. These carriers may have specific service-level agreements and capacity constraints that could impact both the speed and availability of their services as well as the ability of the ecommerce business to keep its delivery promises to customers. A 3PL, however, can help streamline your shipping process and ensure your orders are delivered on time.
For example, when you engage ASCS as your 3PL, you get access to Amazon’s world-class logistics network, which includes over 2,000 facilities (with more than 200 US fulfillment centers) as well as 80,000 trailers, containers, and over 100 aircraft. You can leverage this network to fuel the growth of your ecommerce business around the globe and across various sales channels.
When engaging ASCS’ multichannel fulfillment capabilities, you can optimize your shipping operations by:
- Offering click-to-delivery speeds as fast as two days for customers
- Leveraging Amazon’s expansive network of fulfillment centers to strategically distribute your inventory so it’s as close as possible to customers, thereby reducing shipping times
- Providing GPS-powered tracking on shipments, so you and your customers can monitor the progress of your orders from online checkout to delivery
- Ensuring your customers’ orders arrive on time—as MCF has a 96.4% average on-time delivery rate for all MCF orders worldwide.1
1Based on all orders placed and delivered between October 2024 and September 2025 in the US, and measuring the percentage of orders that were delivered on or before the estimated delivery date generated upon order confirmation.
How to scale your business with a 3PL
A seamless fulfillment process is necessary to meet customer expectations in today’s ecommerce landscape, where fast, reliable delivery is table stakes.
To streamline pick, pack, and ship operations, many companies engage 3PL providers that offer ecommerce fulfillment services to help optimize processes and fuel business growth. Outsourcing your ecommerce fulfillment to a 3PL can help you support the journey of customers’ orders from click to delivery, conquer your ecommerce fulfillment challenges, and free you up to focus on other important areas of your business.
