You got the title “Ops Manager” six months ago. The job description said something about optimizing fulfillment and improving customer experience.

What the job actually is: Slack messages at 9 AM asking why a batch of orders from yesterday hasn’t shipped. Logging into your 3PL’s portal to check. Finding nothing useful. Emailing your account rep. Waiting. Getting a reply four hours later that says “looking into it.” Updating your CX team with “still waiting on an answer.”

That’s not operations management. That’s playing telephone between your company and your warehouse.

The Real Job Description

If you’re running ecommerce ops at a brand doing $5M to $50M in revenue, your actual responsibilities probably look like this:

Monitor fulfillment daily. Are orders shipping on time? Are SLAs being met? Which warehouse is behind?
Catch problems before customers do. A late shipment that you flag proactively is a save. One that a customer flags on Twitter is a fire.
Report to leadership. Your VP of Ops or your founder wants a weekly number. Not a feeling. A number.
Manage 3PL relationships. Hold quarterly business reviews. Negotiate SLAs. Decide when to add capacity or switch providers.
Handle peak season. Black Friday doesn’t wait for your 3PL’s weekly report. You need to see volume spikes in real time, not next Monday morning.

Every single one of these requires data you don’t have easy access to.

Your 3PL’s portal shows you their view of the world. Shopify shows you the order timeline. The carrier shows you tracking events. But nobody stitches it together into “here’s what your ops team needs to know right now.”

What “Chasing” Actually Costs

It’s easy to dismiss this as a minor annoyance. It’s not. Here’s the math.

Say your ops manager spends 45 minutes a day chasing status updates, compiling manual reports, and answering internal questions about fulfillment. That’s conservative for most brands we’ve talked to.

45 minutes x 5 days = 3.75 hours per week on reactive work.

That’s 195 hours a year. Nearly five full work weeks spent copying data between tabs and writing Slack messages that say “checking on this now.” At a fully loaded ops salary, that’s roughly $15K to $20K a year in labor spent on copy-paste work.

And that’s just the direct cost. The bigger cost is what doesn’t happen:

The SLA renegotiation that keeps getting pushed because you don’t have clean data to bring to the table
The routing optimization you’d try if you could see regional performance side by side
The provider switch you suspect would save money but can’t prove without consistent metrics

Your ops person is too busy firefighting to do the strategic work you hired them for.

Why the 3PL Portal Isn’t Enough

Your 3PL has a dashboard. It might even be decent. But it’s built for their operations, not yours.

It shows their warehouse, not your business. Your 3PL’s portal shows what happened inside their four walls. You need to see that data in the context of your Shopify orders, your SLAs, your customer promises.

It doesn’t compare providers. If you use two 3PLs, you have two portals with two different definitions of “on-time.” There’s no way to see a unified view of your fulfillment network. We’ve written a deep dive on the multi-3PL dashboard problem because it’s that common.

It updates on their schedule. Many 3PL portals refresh data once a day. Some update hourly. Very few give you real-time visibility. By the time you see a problem, your customers already found it.

It doesn’t alert you. You have to go looking. Every. Single. Day. Nobody pings you when SLAs start slipping or when a batch of orders has been stuck in “processing” for six hours.

What Ops Teams Actually Need

The gap isn’t more data. Your 3PL, Shopify, and carriers generate plenty of data. The gap is stitched-together visibility that works on your terms.

Fulfillment timelines tied to your Shopify orders. Not “we shipped 847 units today” but “these 23 orders from yesterday haven’t moved and they’re about to breach SLA.”

Alerts, not dashboards. Your ops manager shouldn’t start every morning with a 20-minute portal crawl. They should get a notification when something needs attention and silence when everything’s fine.

Metrics you can take to a meeting. Your VP doesn’t want to hear “I think ShipBob is doing okay.” They want P50 fulfillment time by provider, by warehouse, by week. Formatted, consistent, trustworthy.

Historical trends, not snapshots. Is your 3PL getting slower? Is Monday always the worst day? Did that new warehouse actually improve West Coast delivery times? You need weeks and months of data to answer these questions, not today’s dashboard.

The “Extension of Your Team” Test

Here’s a simple way to evaluate any tool for ecommerce ops: does it make a team of one feel like a team of five?

A good ops tool shouldn’t add work. It should replace the manual checking, the tab-switching, the Slack-chasing, and the spreadsheet-building with something that just works in the background and surfaces what matters.

Compare the two mornings. The chasing version: log into three portals, cross-reference order numbers, build a spreadsheet, Slack your CX team an update, email your 3PL account rep about the 23 orders that look stuck. Forty-five minutes gone before you’ve done anything strategic.

The visibility version: open one dashboard, see 3 orders flagged as approaching SLA breach, all from the same warehouse. Fire off one message to your account rep with the order numbers attached. Done in 2 minutes. The other 847 orders shipped fine. You didn’t need to check them.

That’s the difference between a dashboard and a tool that actually extends your team’s capacity. Dashboards show data. What ecommerce ops teams need is something that watches fulfillment for them and only interrupts when it matters.

Getting There

If you’re running ecommerce ops today and this sounds familiar, a few things to think about:

Audit your time. Track how many minutes per day you spend on reactive fulfillment work. Logging into portals, emailing reps, answering internal “where’s my order” questions from CX. The number is probably higher than you think.

Define your SLAs explicitly. If you can’t state your fulfillment SLA in one sentence (“orders placed before 2 PM ship same day, all others ship next business day”), your 3PL can’t hit a target that doesn’t exist. And you can’t measure what you haven’t defined.

Centralize your data. Whether you build it yourself or use a tool, stop comparing screenshots from two different portals. Your fulfillment data needs to live in one place with one set of definitions. We’ve outlined what fulfillment time actually means because getting the definition right is step zero.

Push for proactive alerts. The goal is to stop checking and start getting notified. If your current setup requires you to go looking for problems, you’ll miss them during the weeks you’re busiest.

That’s where 3PL Pulse comes in. Connect your Shopify store and your 3PLs, set your SLAs, and get alerts when things slip. No more chasing. But whatever tool you use, the principle is the same: your ops team’s job should be managing fulfillment, not monitoring it.

Your Ecommerce Ops Team Shouldn't Be Chasing Your 3PL