The story of how Virtual Logistics became a 3PL provider

what we've learnt over 20 years

Warehouse management
Product information management
Marketplace integrations
Multi-lingual and multi-channel customer service
Returns management
International shipping and courier integration
Multi-vendor, multi-site drop shipping
Accounting functions
Business intelligence reporting
And much more!

Customer journey is often talked about in the order fulfilment process. But as a potential customer of Virtual Logistics, we thought that you might like to learn about our journey.

In truth, we didn’t start out as a third party logistics company.

We’ve been involved in moving boxes worldwide for our in-house companies for over 20 years.

As online selling started to boom, we realised the immense value of marketplaces. So we partnered with Amazon, Tesco Direct and eBay. At the time, this was quite a technical challenge due to the diverse way their systems worked.

Sales, principally on Tesco Direct, escalated and we fulfilled 20,000 orders per month on average. We were handling multiple drop-ship suppliers, various type of shipments, and hundreds of customer services queries and returns.

Although our legacy infrastructure was coping, we needed capacity to grow. So we researched the available software. We knew we needed a system capable of automating everything we’ve learnt over the past 20 years, in an efficient and scaleable way.

The eventual solution combined enterprise-class cloud-based applications with our in-house developed and maintained platform fine-tuned to create efficiencies and accuracies, improved workflows and scalability throughout our operation.

So we decided to utilise our skills, expertise and platform for other companies.

We’d already been approached by Dr Fertility, an online start-up struggling to fulfil their ever-increasing orders. After requirement discussions, they became our first order fulfilment client. In the first 9 months of our partnership, their business grew by 269%! (Read the whole Dr Fertility case study).

Since then we’ve gone from strength to strength. New customers bring new challenges, but that’s the fun part! We learn every day. So when improvements are made for one client, we roll these out across the board, helping us to continually improve our service.

We are fully flexible to accommodate fulfilment requirements, and have even offered customisations that our clients hadn’t thought of. As part of our transformation to third party logistics company, we’ve also been awarded Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime status. This means that we provide next-day delivery of orders made on their website.

Even though our business model has changed:

We pick, pack and ship products as we’ve always done – efficiently, securely and on time.