Black Friday / Cyber Monday isn’t just a stress test for your website and your ads. It’s the moment your 3PL shows you exactly who they are.
You’re seeing your 3PL at their busiest. This is the best time to evaluate if they can truly support your brand as it scales.
Peak seasons like BFCM concentrate all the usual pain points, order spikes, promo complexity, channel conflicts, into a handful of chaotic days. You should use this time as a live audit of whether your current fulfillment provider is the right partner for your current and future goals.
Here’s what your holiday peak season reveals about your 3PL, and what to watch closely.
Communication & Responsiveness
When order volume explodes and carriers start to wobble, communication from your 3PL matters as much as cartons leaving the dock.
What to Look For
- Speed and clarity of responses to tickets and escalations
- Proactive updates about delays, carrier issues, weather, or system outages
- A named, reachable point of contact who is present during peak
- Concrete plans and timelines when problems arise (“Here’s what happened, what we’re doing, and when we’ll update you next”)
What to Ask Yourself
- Are we hearing about issues from our 3PL before customers or platforms complain?
- When something goes wrong, do we get specifics and next steps, or vague responses?
- Do we feel informed and in control, or in the dark and constantly chasing answers?
- In the busiest hours of BFCM, do we trust their communication, or are we refreshing inboxes in frustration?
If you’re in beauty, wellness, or supplements, poor communication can directly impact compliance and safety (e.g., batch/lot questions, product holds). For small appliances, toys, and pet products, it can mean missed delivery windows for gifts, and lost repeat customers.
SLA Performance When It Actually Matters
SLAs are easy to talk about in Q2. Peak Season is when you find out if your 3PL can actually live up to them.
What to Look For
- Actual ship times vs. agreed cut-off times for same-day / next-day processing
- Percentage of orders that miss SLAs during BFCM compared to normal weeks
- Differences in SLA performance by channel (e.g., Amazon vs. DTC vs. retail)
- Data in dashboards or reports that makes it easy to see what’s on-time and what’s slipping
What to Ask Yourself
- Are SLAs still being honored when volume spikes, or do they effectively disappear during BFCM?
- Do we understand why orders miss SLAs and what’s being done about it?
- Did our promo calendar and forecasts give the 3PL a fair shot, and if so, did they rise to the occasion?
- Would we feel confident committing to these SLAs again next peak season?
A strong 3PL may see slight SLA degradation at peak volume, but you’ll still feel a sense of control: clear communication, predictable processing, exceptions handled with urgency. A weak 3PL turns BFCM into a black box.
Accuracy of Picks, Packs, and Kitting
During peak, it’s not enough to just ship fast. Shipping the wrong thing fast is expensive.
What to Look For
- Rate of mis-picks, wrong items, and incomplete orders, especially during your highest-volume days
- Mistakes specific to your category: wrong shades, incorrect inserts or samples, missing items in bundles
- For beauty and supplements, adherence to lot/batch and expiry requirements
- Quality checks on kitting lines and how quickly issues get corrected
What to Ask Yourself
- Did order accuracy stay high even when your 3PL was under maximum pressure?
- Are error rates acceptable for our brand and product complexity, or are we normalizing poor performance?
- Are inaccuracies just “one-offs,” or do we see patterns (certain SKUs, bundles, or channels)?
- How much are fulfillment mistakes costing us in refunds, reships, negative reviews, and long-term brand trust?
A best-in-class 3PL should maintain very high accuracy even in peak season. While acceptable numbers vary by complexity and product type, BFCM shouldn’t suddenly turn into “close enough” season.
Flexibility & Problem-Solving
Peak season is full of surprises: a creator posts about your supplement stack, a toy gets featured in a gift guide, a pet product goes viral. What you’re really testing is how flexible your 3PL can be.
What to Look For
- How quickly your 3PL can add labor, lines, or shifts when demand spikes unexpectedly
- Willingness to re-prioritize work across channels to match your business priorities
- Creative solutions to last-minute changes (e.g., new bundles, viral SKUs, rushed promotions)
- Collaborative conversations focused on “how to make this work”
What to Ask Yourself
- When our plans changed, did our 3PL meet us with solutions or roadblocks?
- Did they show they understand our specific business (category, channels, hero SKUs), or treat us like any other account?
- Does working with them during BFCM feel like a true partnership, or like pushing a boulder uphill?
- If our growth doubles in the next 1–2 years, can we realistically see this 3PL adapting with us?
If peak season exposes a pattern of rigid “no’s” and long lead times for basic operational changes, it’s a sign that 3PL may hold you back as you grow.
Tech Reliability
Your 3PL’s technology stack is the nervous system of your fulfillment operation. BFCM puts it under maximum strain.
What to Look For
- Stability of their WMS and integrations during peak traffic
- Any outages or slowdowns in order ingestion from your ecommerce platforms and marketplaces
- The speed and accuracy of tracking updates and status changes
- Self-serve access to real-time dashboards vs. reliance on delayed manual reports
What to Ask Yourself
- Did we lose time or revenue because of system downtime or data glitches?
- Do their tools give us the visibility we need?
- Does their tech stack feel like a long-term asset to our business, or a risk we constantly have to work around?
For multi-channel consumer brands, tech reliability is table stakes. If your 3PL can’t deliver it during a peak, that’s a warning sign for every season that follows
CX Impact: What Is Your Support Team Seeing?
A great 3PL should make your customer support team’s life easier.
What to Look For
- Volume and themes of “where’s my order?”, “wrong item,” and “order damaged” tickets during your peaks
- Patterns in complaints tied to specific carriers, channels, SKUs, or warehouses
- How quickly and thoroughly your 3PL provides information when your CX team asks for help
- Willingness from your 3PL to adjust processes based on recurring support issues
What to Ask Yourself
- Did our support volume spike because of fulfillment issues, or mostly due to normal peak questions?
- Do we see our 3PL actively helping us reduce future tickets, or just reacting order by order?
- Overall, did our 3PL make it easier or harder to deliver the experience our brand promises?
A strong 3PL is a partner to your CX team, sharing data, patterns, and fixes. A weak 3PL leaves your support team playing detective with limited tools and vague answers.
Turning BFCM Insights Into Action
Black Friday / Cyber Monday is more than just a revenue event. It’s a diagnostic.
Use what you’re seeing right now to answer three big questions:
- Can this 3PL scale with us over the next 1–3 years?
- Are they strengthening or eroding our brand’s reputation during peak?
- Do we feel confident or anxious when volume spikes?
If this year’s BFCM has you questioning whether your current 3PL can truly support your growth, let’s talk. Request a free logistics consultation here, and we’ll walk through your current setup and explore what a more scalable, peak-ready fulfillment strategy would look like for your brand.