Warehouse space is expensive. For ecommerce brands with established fulfillment operations, empty pallets and underutilized square footage represent wasted capital.
But a growing number of brands are flipping that equation. Instead of viewing their warehouse as a necessary cost, they’re transforming excess capacity into a revenue-generating service.
Welcome to Supply Chain as a Service (SCaaS) for brands.
The Brands Already Doing It
The SCaaS model is projected to have reached $7.5 billion in North America by 2025, growing at 7.5% annually. While logistics giants like Amazon pioneered this approach with Fulfillment by Amazon, traditional brands and retailers are now entering the market.
Woolworths, the Australian retailer, launched Primary Connect to share its supply chain capabilities with other brands. Instead of letting distribution centers sit partially empty between their own product runs, they offer warehousing, transportation management, and fulfillment services to external companies.
Cardinal Health provides fulfillment through OptiFreight Logistics, leveraging healthcare distribution expertise and warehouse capacity to serve brands beyond their core pharmaceutical business.
Gap and American Eagle Outfitters both explored SCaaS models during the pandemic, recognizing that their established fulfillment networks could generate revenue while supporting other brands through supply chain disruptions.
These are more and more common. They represent a fundamental shift in how brands with logistics infrastructure view their operations.
Why It Makes Sense (If You Have the Foundation)
The economics are straightforward: warehouse space, WMS technology, carrier contracts, and fulfillment labor all have fixed costs. Whether you’re using 60% of your capacity or 90% of your capacity, many of those costs remain the same.
Monetizing excess capacity turns underutilized assets into incremental revenue without proportional cost increases.
The case for brands offering fulfillment services:
Maximize existing investments. You’ve already paid for the warehouse, implemented a WMS, negotiated carrier rates, and hired fulfillment teams. Offering services to other brands spreads those fixed costs across more volume, improving your cost structure on your own operations while generating new revenue.
Leverage expertise you’ve already built. Brands that have scaled their own fulfillment operations possess knowledge that smaller brands need: how to handle peak season surges, manage returns efficiently, maintain inventory accuracy, and optimize shipping costs. That expertise has value.
Create competitive carrier rates. Higher throughput volume strengthens your negotiating position with carriers. Brands that handle fulfillment for multiple companies can secure better rates than those shipping only their own orders, benefiting both their own operations and their service clients.
Access markets during capacity shortages. Warehouse space became scarce and expensive during the pandemic. Brands with available capacity found they could command premium rates from companies scrambling for fulfillment solutions. Even as capacity normalizes, localized shortages and seasonal demand create ongoing opportunities.
Build relationships with complementary brands. Offering fulfillment services to non-competing brands in adjacent categories can create partnership opportunities, cross-selling potential, and shared customer insights.
The model works best for brands with:
- Established warehouse operations with measurable excess capacity
- Modern WMS infrastructure capable of managing multiple clients
- Operational expertise in omnichannel fulfillment (DTC, B2B, retail)
- Geographic footprint that provides value (proximity to major markets or hard-to-reach locations)
- Team bandwidth to manage additional client relationships
What You Need to Offer Fulfillment Services
Deciding to monetize warehouse capacity is one thing. Executing it without disrupting your own operations is another.
Here’s what brands need to make SCaaS work:
1. Multi-Client Warehouse Management
Your WMS needs to handle inventory and order management for multiple brands simultaneously without errors or cross-contamination. This means:
- Separate inventory tracking by client
- Client-specific picking, packing, and shipping workflows
- Individual reporting and billing per client
- Configurable business rules that accommodate different fulfillment requirements
Most WMS platforms built for single-brand operations require significant customization to support multi-client fulfillment.
2. Flexible Integration Infrastructure
Each brand you serve will have its own ecommerce platforms, ERPs, and selling channels. Supporting multiple clients means connecting to dozens or hundreds of different systems.
You need integration infrastructure that can:
- Onboard new clients quickly without custom development
- Handle order capture from multiple selling channels per client
- Push inventory updates back to each client’s systems
- Route fulfillment confirmations and shipping updates to the correct platforms
- Manage returns across different client policies and systems
Building this integration layer in-house is expensive and time-consuming. Maintaining it as platforms change APIs and release updates becomes a permanent operational burden.
3. Operational Intelligence and Exception Management
Managing fulfillment for your own brand is complex. Managing it for five brands is exponentially more complex.
You need:
- Real-time visibility into order status across all clients
- Proactive exception management that surfaces issues before they impact delivery promises
- Client-specific SLA tracking and reporting
- Automated alerting when orders, inventory, or integrations fail
Without operational intelligence built into your fulfillment infrastructure, you’ll spend more time firefighting problems than generating revenue.
4. Client Onboarding and Account Management
Every new fulfillment client requires:
- Integration setup and testing
- Workflow configuration (how they want orders processed)
- Inventory receiving protocols
- Reporting and billing setup
- Ongoing account management and support
The faster you can onboard clients and the less manual work required to maintain them, the more profitable the service becomes.
The risk factor
Setting up a SCaaS operation doesn’t mean automatic success. Quiet Logistics and Veyer both built sophisticated fulfillment operations and served third-party brands before eventually stepping back from those services. Quiet Logistics powered fulfillment for premium ecommerce brands using robotics and automation before shifting away from third-party clients. Veyer similarly offered fulfillment services to external brands before refocusing on their core operations.
These strategic pivots don’t invalidate the SCaaS model, they just highlight the need to be well prepared before starting operations. Both companies faced specific challenges around maintaining operational standards across diverse client portfolios and the capital intensity of their fulfillment infrastructure. The brands succeeding in warehouse monetization today benefit from lessons learned during these earlier efforts: the importance of client selection, operational standardization, and technology that scales without proportional cost increases.
Modern platforms like Pipe17 enable brands to offer fulfillment services with more flexible infrastructure and lower operational overhead than previous generations of SCaaS providers.
How Pipe17 Enables Brands to Monetize Warehouse Capacity
The difference between “we have extra warehouse space” and “we run a profitable fulfillment service” is operational infrastructure.
Pipe17’s Order Operations Platform provides the connectivity and orchestration layer that makes SCaaS practical for brands.
Managed Connector Network
Pipe17 maintains pre-built integrations to hundreds of selling channels, ERPs, WMS platforms, and carriers. When a new fulfillment client needs to connect Shopify, NetSuite, and FedEx, those connectors are already built and maintained.
Brands offering fulfillment services can onboard clients in days instead of months. When Shopify releases an API update, Pipe17 handles it. Your team doesn’t write or maintain integration code.
Multi-Client Order Orchestration
Pipe17’s platform is built for multi-client operations. Each fulfillment client gets:
- Isolated order routing and inventory management
- Client-specific business rules for order processing
- Independent reporting and visibility
- Separate billing and reconciliation
The platform handles the complexity of managing multiple brands through a single fulfillment operation without requiring custom development.
Real-Time Exception Management
When an order fails to sync, inventory counts drift, or an integration times out, Pipe17 surfaces the issue immediately with context for resolution.
Fulfillment service providers using Pipe17 resolve exceptions in minutes instead of discovering problems when clients email asking where their orders are.
Fast Client Onboarding
Pipe17’s connector network and configuration tools compress client onboarding timelines. Brands can go from “we’d like to use your fulfillment services” to processing live orders in under a week.
This speed matters when prospective clients are evaluating multiple fulfillment providers. The faster you can onboard, the more competitive your service offering.
Operational Visibility
Brands running fulfillment services for multiple clients need consolidated visibility across all operations. Pipe17 provides a single platform to monitor order flow, inventory levels, fulfillment performance, and integration health across every client.
The Decision: Build, Buy, or Partner
Brands considering warehouse monetization have three paths:
Build integration and orchestration infrastructure in-house. This requires development resources, ongoing maintenance, and years to reach feature parity with purpose-built platforms. Most brands pursuing SCaaS find the build path unsustainable.
Buy point-to-point integrations for each client. This creates fragmented systems, maintenance overhead, and limits how quickly you can onboard new clients. Integrations break when platforms update APIs, and you’re responsible for fixing them.
Partner with an order operations platform designed for multi-client fulfillment. Platforms like Pipe17 provide the connectivity, orchestration, and operational intelligence required to run fulfillment services profitably without building or maintaining integration infrastructure.
From Expense to Asset
Warehouse capacity stops being a cost center when you can monetize it efficiently.
The brands succeeding with SCaaS go beyond offering storage. They provide the complete operational infrastructure that smaller brands need: inventory management, order processing, carrier optimization, returns handling, and integration with modern commerce stacks.
The difference between a successful fulfillment service and an operational nightmare is the infrastructure layer that connects everything.
One thing to keep in mind is that you need to have the right sales team to leverage your excess capacity. Customers will not find you by themselves, so having an aggressive and efficient team able to find this business is a must. The economics are on your side, but you have to find the right customers and contract with them.
If you’re sitting on underutilized warehouse capacity and considering whether SCaaS makes sense for your brand, the question isn’t whether there’s demand. The question is whether you have the operational infrastructure to deliver fulfillment services without sacrificing your own operations.
That’s where Pipe17 comes in.
Ready to explore how Pipe17 enables brands to monetize warehouse capacity? Book a demo to see how the platform supports multi-client fulfillment operations.
