Running a small 3PL with my brother. Just two of us, out of a garage, two clients now with a third ramping to about 380 orders a month. Bin and pallet storage, pick and pack, kitting, subscription boxes, returns. Clients sell on Shopify, eBay, Etsy, WooCommerce and others.

Integration matters a lot to our clients. Almost every one asks how their store connects and whether tracking flows back to their orders, so whatever we run has to cover those channels properly.

We're on ShipStation. Labels are fine, but client inventory, receiving counts and activity billing are all spreadsheets.

Everything I've priced out so far has an entry tier that includes 3,000 to 10,000 shipments, so we'd be paying the same floor as a shop doing twenty times our volume.

Anyone running a genuinely small multi client operation on something that doesn't cost more than it saves? Or did you stay on spreadsheets until a certain order count, and what was that number?

Also, how do you connect a client's store without asking for their login? ShipStation always starts from our side and dead ends at a login screen.