A look at UPS eFulfillment

Purpose

Tired of relying on Amazon distribution and considering omni-channel for your growing online business? We have been there, done that and can give you our personal experience with the new eFulfillment by UPS.

UPS eFulfillment currently now has 4 warehouses: California and Kentucky, the two I used, and now Atlanta and Dallas yet still a large portion of the middle USA is cost prohibitive to ship to. The mountain time zone and Pacific Northwest are loss leaders.

What we've done

We shipped 2 years exclusively with Amazon, then opted for UPS eFulfillment in 2020 at the onset of the pandemic. We have tens of thousands of transactions and in thousands of instances we were overbilled with UPS so we left.

They also raised the prices in 2021 giving us zero reason to return. They have since added more DCs, but that means you chase your inventory more and more and still need a home base. Atlanta DC really does nothing.

So it is not for most customers...unless freight cost / sale isn't a big deal to your business. We tried Ware2Go (owned by UPS) but they are not good at single package orders.

2021 NEW FEE! Monthly threshold - $1500 a month for technology fee!

East coast doesnt include a top 5 US city Houston.

This zone was the most important close to 70% of all sales

The entire Mountain and Pacific NW are excluded

This was necessary, but also a game to keep CA in stock in all SKUs

The green areas were a loss on every sale.

Here you can see how much of the country is 2X. Houston, Denver, Seattle etc.

For the green areas - Zone B, the base rate for 2 day was $11.24 flat plus $1.60 per pound. Not only that, this is not net weight. UPS uses the dimensional weight of the closest box they have and use for that order. I had thousands of transactions of a single item and I was charged 5 different weights because they used 5 different sized boxes for the same sized item. Inconsistent billing has turned into a nightmare to get credits applied for their mistakes. In 11 months they are still working on credits owed.

*Amazon - does not use the dimensional weight of the box, they use the laser scan of the item - does not matter what box the item fits in.

"So it wasn't the coverage why we left, it was the overbilling month after month wore me out. I was tired of chasing down refunds."

Another thing you need to consider is how to strategically send your inventory. If one warehouse runs out, you will be chasing your supply chain or moving inventory from one warehouse to another, and that is not cheap at all. So as Dallas is added, and Atlanta, you will be chasing and reassigning inventory in hopes to not pay $20+ to ship a customer order and lose on any sale that is not in Zone A. Amazon handles their internal transfers on their dime.

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