How ECOMSPACES Boosted Efficiency and Client List 5x

Executive Summary

Top Operator (TOP), a national 3PL with 7 locations, partnered with High-Volume Brand (HVB) to optimize fulfillment for a rapidly scaling product line. By implementing ShipHero’s Direct Pack-to-Light technology, the operator proved that a single warehouse station can handle massive volume. The result was a sustained average of 253 items per hour and a peak throughput of 555 items per hour, allowing the 3PL to centralize inventory and manage 1.1 million projected annual orders without bottlenecks.

The Challenge: Managing Steady, High-Volume Growth

HVB did not face an overnight crisis, but rather the compounding pressure of sustained success. Their order volume nearly doubled in two years, creating a complex logistical hurdle:

• 2023: 602,000 Orders
• 2024: 970,000 Orders
• 2025: 1.4 Million Orders

As the brand grew, TOP faced a choice: continue fracturing inventory across multiple warehouses to handle the load, or find a technology that could process the entire volume from a single hub.

The Strategic Pivot: Centralization via Automation

In previous years, the 3PL attempted to manage peaks by splitting inventory among different warehouses. According to the 3PL’s Key Accounts Director, this was “not a good idea,” as it added complexity and reduced efficiency.

To solve this, TOP deployed ShipHero’s Direct Pack-to-Light. This system uses visual cues to automate decision-making at the packing station, allowing a single facility to handle the throughput that previously required a multi-node network.

“Pack-to-Light was undoubtedly a game changer; it allowed us to handle the entire projected peak volume from a single facility, whereas in previous years, we had tried splitting the inventory among different warehouses. This client’s order profile and product mix are a perfect fit for this flow.”

— Key Accounts Director, Top Operator (TOP)

The Solution: Direct Pack-to-Light Automation

To achieve this level of centralization and speed, the 3PL utilized a dual-feature strategy. The concept of “Direct Pack-to-Light” combines two distinct ShipHero capabilities into a unified, high-velocity workflow:

• Direct Pack Station: A setup where the packer completes an entire order—scanning, packaging, and labeling—at one station. This eliminates the travel time between picking and packing areas, streamlining the fulfillment lifecycle into a single touchpoint.
  
  
• Pack-to-Light Technology: A visual guidance system using LED light modules on bins or carts to direct the packer to the correct items. This eliminates guesswork by illuminating the exact product location, ensuring the packer never has to search or read complex screen instructions during the picking process.
  
  See more information at ShipHero’s Pack-to-Light feature page. 

By combining the structural efficiency of the Direct Pack Station with the visual speed of Pack-to-Light Technology, the operator removed cognitive load from the packers, allowing for “follow-the-light” simplicity even with complex orders.

The Results: Verified Throughput Data

TOP relied on this combined technology to successfully meet the brand’s throughput needs. To ensure the case study relied on accurate production capabilities rather than theoretical estimates, the operations team analyzed performance using “5-minute active blocks” to filter out idle time.

The Benchmark: Before vs. After

The warehouse shattered its previous manual baselines established during the 2023 peak season:

The Impact on “Massive Orders”

The data highlights that the system maintained high velocity even when handling “massive orders”. Typically, large orders with high line counts create bottlenecks at the label printer, but the Pack-to-Light workflow mitigated this, allowing for continuous flow even during complex packing scenarios.

Beyond Speed: Strategic & Operational Gains

While speed is the primary metric, the 3PL’s leadership identified two critical indirect benefits that brought immense value to the business structure:

• Simplified Inventory Planning: In logistics, managing the right inventory volume to meet demand is a major challenge requiring precise forecasting. By using Direct Pack-to-Light to handle all volume in one place, the brand removed the variable of “multi-node splitting” from the equation. This simplified demand planning, reduced the complexity of allocation, and lowered the costs associated with fracturing inventory across locations.
  
  
• Optimized Replenishment: The efficiency gains extended beyond the pack station. The operator noted that on-site inventory movements related to replenishment tasks were positively impacted. As the pack stations became more predictable and efficient, the flow of goods for replenishment became smoother and more synchronized.
  

Why This Matters for Scaling Brands

For HVB, the partnership with TOP provided stability during critical growth phases. As noted by the Key Accounts Director, the brand has “found a solid partner... one that covers the market effectively by providing great shipping service.”

By moving from manual processing to Direct Pack-to-Light, the 3PL successfully maintained system integration and on-time accuracy for a volume of 1.1 million orders, proving that the right tech stack allows brands to scale without fracturing their inventory operations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Disclaimer:The companies featured in this case study requested anonymity for competitive reasons. “Top Operator (TOP)” and “High-Volume Brand (HVB)” are placeholders used to represent the parties involved; however, all throughput metrics and operational results presented are factual and verified based on actual warehouse performance data.

Start a 3PL Two Weeks Before Black Friday? It’s Possible with ShipHero.

Good Company was approached by a large dinnerware supplier that needed a 3PL, just a few weeks before Black Friday.

They would be Good Company’s first ever 3PL client and there was no room for error. Good Company needed a solution that could easily integrate with Shopify, and that would scale with them as they were looking to grow quickly. This was just the beginning. Enter ShipHero. With Warehouse Management Software that can serve 3PLs just as well as brands, and a direct integration with Shopify, it was the obvious choice. After the first sales call and then onboarding, it became apparent that ShipHero was the right solution.

A Multi-Tool for Your Business

“ShipHero checked all the boxes,” said Chad Carlton, the founder of Good Company. “All the fundamentals are there.”

Good Company found that the seamless integration with Shopify was just the beginning of how ShipHero could make their 3PL work better than ever. With an average of six items per order and over 2,000 SKUs, ShipHero’s multi-item batch feature was key to making their warehouse team’s lives easier. “We were able to slash pick times in half,” Carlton said.

“ShipHero for the money, service level and support there is no comparable offering. ShipHero is the multi-tool in our belt.”

Moving Beyond Basics

Good Company was able to use many of ShipHero’s most helpful features to increase their revenue and build a reputation for good work. “We went from shipping out 500 to 600 units a day to 6,000 to 10,000 units a day. That was all built on the back of ShipHero managing the nuts and bolts of the organization,” Carlton said.

Dynamic slotting and rate shopping proved their value as quickly as multi-item batch and the seamless Shopify integration. With these tools, Good Company was able to build their business without a website or a name. Their outstanding work and service levels were all the promotion they needed.

Helping Clients to Help Themselves

Because ShipHero is intuitive and easy-to-use, Good Company clients have all they need to help themselves. “The ability to teach new customers how to use the software so they can help themselves is a huge difference maker,” Carlton said. “ShipHero’s client facing transparency and the dashboard that it delivers to clients has been probably the best wow factor when prospecting new customers.”

Growth is On its Way

Chad Carlton believes that the future is bright for Good Company. “The intent is to continue to scale – we will go multi-warehouse – will go to more LTL fulfillment to become more well-rounded … go more omnichannel to contact more traditional brick and mortar retailers …”

“With so much growth on the horizon, it’s important to know that your partners are in it for the long haul. The leadership, the service levels, they all inspire confidence that we needn’t be concerned that ShipHero will no longer grow to satisfy our current and future needs.”

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How BURST Cuts Fully-Loaded Costs by Over 35% with ShipHero

“Since switching to ShipHero, we’ve reduced our fully-loaded costs by 35%.
At the volumes we move, that’s huge.”

BURST is the affordable, subscription oral care company championed by thousands of dental professionals across the USA. Their product lineup includes their premier sonic toothbrush

HIGHLIGHTS

CHALLENGES

• Partnering with a 3PL to provide on-time shipping and fulfillment
• Ensuring the 3PL’s software can scale with 100% YoY growth
• Gaining order transparency to ensure BURST is able to deliver exceptional customer service

SOLUTION

• Seamless integration with ShipHero APIs
• Fast and intuitive picking and packing capabilities for 3PL warehouse teams
• Visibility into order status for the customer experience team

RESULTS

• Fully-loaded costs cut by over 35%
• 100,000+ shipments per month
• Over 100% YoY growth w/ similar growth projected for the future

CHALLENGES

Ensuring 3PL software scales with explosive growth

BURST was co-founded by Hamish Khayat and Brittany Stewart in 2017, and in less than a year they had already amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It’s no exaggeration to say that this company ‘BURST’ onto the ecommerce scene. By the end of 2019, the company reported 100% year-over-year growth and a 140% increase in ‘BURST Ambassadors.’ These brand advocates, including dentists and hygienists across the country, now number more than 20,000 strong. But as Brittany explains, with meteoric growth comes challenges. Specifically, BURST’s 3PL partners were struggling to fulfill and ship orders at a breakneck pace that matched their growth.

She says, “We’re moving significant volumes—over a hundred thousand packages every single month. We’ve outgrown some 3PLs. The problem with most warehouses boiled down to their software capability—it wasn’t capable of scaling with our growth.”

“Honesty and transparency are so important in a 3PL partner. Issues are going to crop up—I just want to know about them,” Brittany says. “Our retention rate is directly tied to our ability to provide on-time fulfillment and unbelievable customer service. We can’t do that if we don’t know what’s going on.”

BURST finally found the perfect fulfillment partner in Swoop, a Las Vegas-based ecommerce 3PL. And Swoop found the perfect Warehouse Management System (WMS) in ShipHero.

“We have a very close relationship with our fulfillment partner, Swoop. They started looking for a WMS that would help them scale with our growth. We tested out a lot of systems together, and nothing was quite as good as ShipHero” Brittany says.

“The problem with most warehouses boiled down to their software capability—it wasn’t capable of scaling with our growth.”

SOLUTION

Painless and intuitive warehouse management system

According to Brandon, owner and CEO of Swoop, ShipHero has “exceeded all expectations.” He says that for a lot of 3PLs “onboarding clients can be quite the task [but] ShipHero has found a way to make it very painless and very quick.”

ShipHero’s software is the perfect fit for ecommerce fulfillment 3PL warehouses looking to scale up. Part of what makes it such an effective solution is its seamless integration with must-have distribution platforms like Amazon.

“We have a Fulfilled By Merchant (FBM) storefront on Amazon. It took us maybe a minute to integrate ShipHero into everything,” Brittany explains.

“Anyone who’s done FBM Amazon fulfillment knows that it can be a pain in the ass without the proper systems in place. With ShipHero, fulfillment is as easy as slapping labels onto packing slips. The integration is perfect and seamless,” she adds.

Getting set up with ShipHero was exceedingly simple. A dedicated solutions engineer visited Swoop’s warehouse to help Brandon and his team with migration, education, training, and rollout. Brandon describes it as a “true partnership” as opposed to just another piece of software you invest in and never wind up using.

After that, using ShipHero within the warehouse is intuitive.

“Through ShipHero, we have the ability to export our orders, get transparency into what’s moving, assess issues, purchase labels, and ship on our accounts. It’s all stuff you need—laid out in a way that’s intuitive and useful for you,” Brittany says.

ShipHero also provides much-needed visibility into the fulfillment process for Brittany’s team. With it, they’re able to maintain the same exceptional, high-level of customer service that first catapulted the BURST brand into the limelight.

We have a team of 30 people responding to customer requests full-time. With ShipHero, they can see what’s going on with an order, make notes, and talk to the warehouse—all through one user-friendly interface,” Brittany says.

ShipHero has even worked with Brittany directly to add options that increase back-end efficiency. For example, instead of needing to pick and weigh each order individually, the ‘bulk shipping’ feature allows warehouse staff to easily pick and ship hundreds of the same product—perfect for a company with limited SKUs.

And if anything ever is confusing, Brittany has an easy-to-navigate knowledge database at her fingertips—help.shiphero.com—and she knows that ShipHero’s team is always standing by to help.

“With ShipHero, fulfillment is as easy as slapping labels onto packing slips. The integration is perfect and seamless.”

RESULTS

Fully-loaded costs cut by 35% or more

BURST continues to have extraordinary retention rates for a subscription-based business, and that’s wholly thanks to their stellar customer service and super-fast turnaround times.

According to Brittany, ShipHero is part of the solution that enables them to continuously deliver that high-quality service.

“We have unbelievable retention rates because we strive to create an incomparable experience for our customers. Robust and user-friendly software makes that possible. A solution like ShipHero pays for itself over and over again,” she says.

With ShipHero, Brittany is confident that her 3PL has a software solution that will enable them to keep pace as BURST expands—which is good, because the company’s growth doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

“In 2020, we anticipate our growth rate doubling native to the US. Projections indicate that we’ll grow another 60–70% the year after. As for international growth—that’s another beast for another day,” she says.

BURST currently moves well over 100,000 packages each month. Brittany expects that number to double within a year—and that’s before BURST takes its products to an international market.

“To make that growth a reality, ShipHero is vital. We need software that will scale with us as our volumes increase and we expand into multiple locations. The ability to do that without extensively programming lead times (i.e., logic for routing one thing to one place and another thing to another place) is helpful,” she says.

Having compared ShipHero to other solutions firsthand, Brittany’s glad to have finally found a partner that’s both saving her money and as invested in her business’s success as she is.

“Since switching to ShipHero, we’ve reduced our fully-loaded costs by 35%. At the volumes we move, that’s huge,” Brittany says.

“Robust and user-friendly software makes [our high retention rate] possible. A solution like ShipHero pays for itself over and over again.”

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