You didn’t plan to become a professional tab-switcher. But here you are: three browser tabs, three logins, three dashboards, and zero confidence that you know what’s actually happening across your fulfillment network.

Using multiple 3PLs is often the right call. Domestic 3PL for speed. A marketplace fulfillment option for Prime eligibility. Maybe a regional provider for specific SKUs or seasonal overflow. The strategy is sound. The visibility isn’t.

Why Brands Use Multiple 3PLs

Before we get into the problem, let’s acknowledge: this is usually a smart business decision.

Geographic coverage. A single provider with one warehouse in Ohio doesn’t work when half your customers are in California. Two strategically placed 3PLs can cut transit times from 5 days to 2.

Channel requirements. Selling on Amazon and Shopify? You might need Amazon MCF or FBA for Prime orders and a traditional 3PL for everything else. Different channels, different fulfillment requirements.

Risk mitigation. One warehouse goes down during a flood, a system outage, or peak season capacity crush. If all your eggs are in one basket, you’re dark until they recover. Two providers means you can reroute.

SKU specialization. Some products need cold storage. Others are oversized. Your main 3PL might handle standard shipments brilliantly but can’t deal with your 80-pound furniture line.

The reasons to split fulfillment across providers are real and growing. According to industry surveys, brands with $10M+ in revenue commonly use 2-4 fulfillment providers. That number is trending up, not down.

The problem isn’t the strategy. It’s what happens after you sign the contracts.

The Dashboard Problem

Each 3PL builds their portal for their world. That makes sense from their perspective. They’re showing you what happened inside their four walls. But you need to see across all the walls.

Different metrics, different definitions

Your domestic 3PL shows “Orders Shipped Today: 847.” Your overflow provider shows “Fulfillment Rate: 99.2%.” Your marketplace channel shows “Units Dispatched: 1,203.”

Three numbers. Three definitions. No way to add them up into “here’s how my fulfillment network performed today.”

Even when providers track the same concept, they define it differently. “On-time” might mean label created before cutoff for one provider and carrier pickup confirmed for another. There’s an entire deep dive on this definition problem because it’s that pervasive. The short version: your providers’ 99% and 97% on-time rates aren’t comparable. They’re measuring different things.

Different time horizons

One dashboard shows you a real-time feed. Another updates hourly. A third refreshes once a day at 6 AM their time, which is 9 AM yours.

So when you check in at 10 AM Eastern to get a picture of your fulfillment network:

Provider A: Live data through 10:00 AM
Provider B: Data through 9:00 AM (last hourly refresh)
Provider C: Data through 6:00 AM Pacific yesterday (daily refresh)

You’re looking at three snapshots taken at three different moments and mentally stitching them together into a “current” picture. That picture is always wrong. The question is just how wrong.

Different alert philosophies

One provider emails you about everything. Order acknowledged. Pick started. Label created. Carrier scanned. Five emails per order. You stop reading them.

Another provider sends nothing unless you log in and check. No alerts. No emails. If something goes sideways, you find out when the customer emails you.

You’ve got alert fatigue from one and radio silence from another. Neither approach tells you what actually needs your attention right now.

The Hidden Costs

The tab-switching is annoying. But the real costs are what you miss while switching tabs.

Problems that fall between dashboards

Order gets routed to the wrong provider. Provider A doesn’t have the SKU. It sits there. Provider B doesn’t know it exists. Nobody flags it because in each individual dashboard, everything looks fine. Provider A shows “0 orders pending” (because it’s not their SKU). Provider B shows “all orders on track” (because they never received it).

The customer emails three days later: “Where’s my order?”

That’s when you find out. Your customer became your monitoring system.

Inaccurate performance reviews

You sit down quarterly to review your 3PL relationships. Provider A says they shipped 98% on time. Provider B says 94%. Looks like A is better, right?

Not so fast. A measures “shipped” at label creation. B measures at carrier scan. If you normalize to the same measurement point, the numbers might flip. Or they might be identical. You genuinely don’t know, because you’re comparing numbers produced by completely different methodologies.

Making vendor decisions on non-comparable data is how you fire the wrong 3PL.

The weekly reporting grind

Every Monday morning, someone on your team opens three dashboards, pulls numbers into a Google Sheet, manually reconciles the data, adjusts for different date ranges and definitions, and produces a “unified fulfillment report.”

This takes 2-4 hours. Every week. And the person doing it knows the numbers are approximate at best. They’ve made judgment calls on how to normalize the data. Those judgment calls aren’t documented. When that person goes on vacation, the report either doesn’t happen or gets produced differently.

We’ve talked to ops teams spending 10+ hours a month on this. That’s 120+ hours a year of skilled labor producing a report that nobody fully trusts.

Delayed issue detection

If something breaks at one provider, how fast do you know?

With a single 3PL, you might catch it in their dashboard within hours. With three providers, you’re checking each one less frequently. Your attention is split across three dashboards. A slowdown at your overflow provider often doesn’t register until end of week when you’re building that Monday report.

By then, 200 orders have shipped late. Customers are already upset. You’re in damage control instead of prevention.

The DIY Approach (And Where It Breaks)

Before you invest in tooling, you can try to solve this with spreadsheets and exports. Here’s what that looks like, honestly.

What works (for a while)

Daily CSV exports from each provider into a master spreadsheet
A mapping table that translates each provider’s status names to your standard (e.g., Provider A’s “Dispatched” = Provider B’s “Shipped” = your “Carrier Has It”)
A pivot table showing orders by provider, status, and age
Conditional formatting to highlight orders older than your SLA threshold

This can work if you have 2 providers handling under 200 orders a day combined. You’ll spend 30-60 minutes a day maintaining it.

Where it breaks

Scale: Past 500 orders/day, manual reconciliation becomes a full-time job.

Timeliness: You’re working with exported data, which means you’re always looking backward. By the time you spot a problem in yesterday’s export, it’s already a day old.

Consistency: The person maintaining the spreadsheet makes normalization decisions that aren’t documented. When they’re out, the backup does it slightly differently. Your week-over-week trends have invisible methodology changes baked in.

Edge cases: Orders that get split, rerouted, or cancelled across providers create reconciliation nightmares. Your spreadsheet formula handles the 95% case. The other 5% gets manually investigated or quietly ignored.

If this works for your current volume, genuinely, keep doing it. But know that it stops scaling at some point, and that point usually arrives during peak season when you can least afford to lose visibility.

What Unified Visibility Actually Looks Like

The fix isn’t a better spreadsheet. It’s a layer that sits above your individual 3PL portals and normalizes everything into one view.

One definition of “on time”

You decide what “shipped” means for your business. Carrier pickup? First scan? Label creation? Whatever you choose, it applies consistently across every provider. Now 98% from Provider A and 94% from Provider B are actually comparable numbers.

For a deeper look at how to set these measurement points, see our post on when “shipped” doesn’t actually mean shipped.

One timeline per order

Regardless of which provider fulfilled it, every order shows the same timeline: received, processing, shipped, in transit, delivered. The underlying events might come from different APIs with different field names, but you see a single, consistent view.

Order #4817 went through Provider A. Order #4818 went through Provider B. Both show up in the same list, with the same columns, measured the same way.

Apples-to-apples comparison

This is the big one. When every provider is measured against the same definitions, you can finally answer questions like:

Which provider is actually faster?
Which provider’s “fast” days are faster than the other’s “slow” days?
Is the cost difference between providers justified by performance?
Should you route more volume to the provider with better SLA adherence?

These are basic questions. Without normalized data, they’re unanswerable.

Alerts that mean something

Instead of “Provider A sent 47 emails” and “Provider B sent zero,” you get alerts based on what actually matters: orders breaching your SLA threshold, regardless of which provider is handling them.

One alert: “12 orders are past your 24-hour fulfillment target.” You click through. Eight are at Provider A (unusual spike), four are at Provider B (normal volume, just running behind). Now you know where to focus. You didn’t have to check three dashboards to find it.

The Broader Pattern

This isn’t just a 3PL problem. It’s the same pattern that plays out anywhere you’ve split a function across multiple vendors: fragmented visibility, inconsistent measurement, and delayed detection.

But fulfillment is where it hurts most because the feedback loop runs through your customers. A marketing analytics discrepancy is annoying. A fulfillment visibility gap means real people waiting for packages that nobody’s tracking.

The brands that run multi-3PL networks well aren’t the ones with the best 3PLs. They’re the ones with the best visibility across their 3PLs. The providers are the hands. You need the eyes.

If you’re running multiple 3PLs and spending hours stitching dashboards together, that’s the problem 3PL Pulse was built to solve. One view across all your providers, normalized metrics, and alerts that cut through the noise. See how it works or check out the full feature set. Because managing multiple 3PLs is hard enough without the dashboard problem making it harder.

The Multi-3PL Dashboard Problem (And What to Do About It)