Innovation lets 3PLs win more deals while reducing onboarding costs
Pipe17, a solution provider that helps ecommerce businesses optimize their order operations, announced the launch of the Pipe17 3PL Connectivity Suite, a version of Pipe17’s order operations hub that lets 3rd Party Logistics (3PL) businesses provide their customers with robust easy-to-setup connectivity between their own Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) and over 100 ecommerce platforms, marketplaces, point-of-sales, ERPs and other back office applications like NetSuite, Quickbooks, and Acumatica as well as EDI transactions for hundreds of the largest retail trading partners.
“For 3PLs, customer integration has been a craft business, requiring a substantial investment in people, process and tools. Solutions are complex and costs are high to the point that they limit growth and are a source of customer dissatisfaction”, said Mo Afshar Co-founder and CEO of Pipe17, “With our new 3PL Connectivity Suite, Pipe17 is fundamentally changing the economics of the problem so that 3PLs can expand their market, close more deals, onboard customers faster, and deliver outstanding service with a minimal investment in technology. Our innovation makes all this possible.”
Customer Connectivity: Essential and Challenging
3PLs seeking to capitalize on the multi-trillion dollar ecommerce economy are frequently held back by their inability to meet customer demands for deep integration between their own internal business applications and a plethora of ecommerce applications.
Existing integration solutions for 3PLs rely on developers, equipped with expensive tools, building integrations between a given customer’s ecommerce tech stack and the 3PLs own WMS. However, with rising development costs and an increasingly competitive business environment that includes industry giants Amazon and now Flexport, 3PLs are finding it hard to keep up using this approach. The impact is measured in lost deals and clients.
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“From day one we have been working with fast growing ecommerce 3PLs and 4PLs to develop a better solution to their connectivity problems”, Afshar continued. “We are now bringing this effort to market so that 3PLs can focus on doing what they do best and no longer have to be integration experts to succeed.”
Pipe17 3PL Connectivity Suite is a complete solution for 3PLs to deliver and manage their customer connectivity at scale. It consists of the following components:
- Intelligent Connectors. Used to integrate customer ecommerce applications, they provide reliable bi-directional order, inventory, product and fulfillment data flows between a 3PL’s own Warehouse Management System (WMS) and a growing range of marketplaces, shopping carts, Point of Sales, ERPs and financial applications (the full list of supported applications can be found here).
Customer connections can be set up in as fast as 15 minutes, with no code required. With up to 70% or more of customer onboarding time tied up in integration, this translates into a massive reduction in customer Go Lives.
Pipe17’s composable technology eliminates the tremendous inefficiencies of developer-driven solutions by giving 3PLs a single connection point from their internal application platform to an expanding range of ecommerce applications.
- Connection Operations Management. Used to monitor customer order flow for problems, it provides the 3PL with a centralized connectivity operations center that includes a consolidated live-traffic view of customer activity with real time notification for exceptions that require attention and additional debugging tools for resolving customer issues quickly.
- Per Customer Portal. 3PL can also provision and deploy portals to their individual customers where they can view and manage their own order flow and receive alerts.
- API Gateway. Used when 3PLs lack an API or are concerned about their API quality, it provides 3PLs with a manageable open API to their WMS for clients and 3rd parties.
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3PLs can adopt the components that best suit their business needs. Pipe17 offers multiple options for delivering service from co-selling to reselling and white-labling. Furthermore, Pipe17 already supports many popular WMSs including Whiplash, ShipHero, 3PLCentral, Deposco, Peoplevox and Northstar. 3PLs that use any of these WMS can switch on service immediately and begin realizing benefits.
Pipe17 reports multiple 3PLs are already achieving excellent results working with Pipe17, including industry leaders like Ware2Go, a UPS Company, Stord, ShipHero and Deliverr (now Flexport).
“Partnering with Pipe17 immediately broadened the range of ecommerce applications that can be seamlessly integrated with ShipHero thus enabling us to quickly expand our business,” said Aaron Rubin, co-founder and CEO of ShipHero. “Our customers have been very pleased with the service and so have we.”