Innovation helps 3PLs win more deals, reduce onboarding costs, and accelerate ecommerce adoption.
Pipe17 Inc., a solution provider that helps ecommerce businesses optimize their order operations, today announced the launch of the Pipe17 3PL Connectivity Suite, a version of Pipe17’s Order Operations Hub that lets third party logistics (3PL) businesses provide their customers with robust easy-to-setup connectivity. The Suite allows 3PLs to easily connect their customers to their own warehouse management system (WMS) and over 100 ecommerce platforms, marketplaces, point-of-sales, ERPs, and other back-office applications like NetSuite, Quickbooks, and Acumatica. It also will handle 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. 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.”
Mo Afshar
Co-Founder & CEO @ Pipe17
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.
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, Pipe17’s intelligent connectors 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 (explore Pipe17’s Connector Directory).
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 commerce 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, Pipe17 provides 3PLs 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
Used to give customers visibility into their own order flows, 3PLs can quickly provision and deploy Pipe17 portals to their individual customers to dramatically improve collaborative order-to-fulfillment management and error resolution time.
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 so clients and third parties can customize and expand their order operations workflows to match their business needs.
Pipe17: Streamlined 3PL Customer Connectivity
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-labeling. Furthermore, Pipe17 already supports many popular WMS vendors including Whiplash, ShipHero, 3PLCentral, Deposco, Peoplevox and Northstar Automation. 3PLs that use any of these WMS vendors can switch on service immediately and begin realizing benefits.
“From day one we have been working with fast growing ecommerce 3PLs and 4PLs to develop a better solution to their connectivity problems. 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.”
Mo Afshar
Co-Founder & CEO @ Pipe17
Pipe17 reports multiple 3PLs are already achieving excellent results with the Pipe17 3PL Connectivity Suite, 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. Our customers have been very pleased with the service and so have we.”
Aaron Rubin
Co-Founder & CEO @ ShipHero
If your 3PL is seeking a better solution to connecting and managing integrations with customers ecommerce applications, we urge you to get in touch with Pipe17 today!
