The Best E-commerce Fulfillment Workflows for 3PLs

E-commerce fulfillment is fast-paced, competitive — and packed with complexity. From single-SKU fashion drops to multi-line food and beverage orders, the way you pick and pack matters. For 3PLs and brands alike, optimizing your warehouse management system (WMS) workflows for different order profiles is essential to maximize efficiency, accuracy, and margins.

When it comes to e-commerce fulfillment, there is one thing that always rings true: speed and accuracy are key to getting orders out the door fast. However, depending on your industry, the way you go about e-commerce pick and pack for your stock can vary greatly.

But here’s the catch — there’s no one-size-fits-all. Every 3PL operates differently — whether you're handling cosmetics or beverages, each product category has its own workflow requirements for precision and compliance. That’s why understanding the right e-commerce workflows for your niche is key to optimizing performance and staying competitive.

TL;DR: CartonCloud’s e-commerce WMS includes specific e-commerce pick and pack workflows that allow users to streamline high-volume e-commerce orders with speed and accuracy, across a range of industry sectors. 

Q: How can optimized e-commerce workflows in my mobile app WMS give me a competitive edge?

A: Using a WMS mobile app to take care of your e-com operation empowers your team with the workflows they need to move fast, stay accurate, and work efficiently across a range of e-commerce order types.

Here’s how you can use CartonCloud’s mobile app to manage your e-commerce operation with speed and precision:

• Accurate picking with barcode scanning – By pairing your CartonCloud mobile app with a Bluetooth scanner, your team can scan items as they pick — confirming products, locations, and order details in real time. This helps eliminate any picking errors, ensuring your picking process stays streamlined from start to finish.
• Pick multiple orders at once – For high-volume e-commerce fulfillment, CartonCloud’s Pick to Tote feature allows your team to scan and place items into assigned totes as they move throughout the warehouse — keeping each order separate, organized, and ready to grab for easy packing.
• Bulk order picking made easy – When you’re facing a rush of hundreds (or thousands) of identical orders, your CartonCloud app can group those orders together for bulk picking, making it easy to grab large volumes of the same product in a single pass.
• Speed up fulfillment with Wave Picking – Using CartonCloud’s Wave Picking feature, your team can pick up to 100 items in a single run — cutting down on walking time and ensuring you can maintain fast fulfillment times.
• Keep your team aligned and orders on track – With the CartonCloud mobile app, you can assign picking and packing tasks to your team in just a few taps, as well as track progress in real time. As each order is picked, packed, or dispatched, its status is instantly updated in both the CartonCloud mobile and web apps, giving you (and your customers) real-time visibility at every stage of fulfillment.

Learn more about how to use your WMS software for e-commerce here.

Q: What e-commerce fulfillment scenarios will my 3PL likely deal with?

A: When it comes to e-commerce pick and pack, your 3PL will likely come across a few common scenarios — depending on the types of products you store and ship. Here are some of the most typical in e-com:

• High-volumes of identical orders - Managing sudden surges of the exact same product like during flash sales.
• High-volumes of multi-Item orders - Needing to fulfill numerous orders, with each including different SKU types.
• Perishable products: Handling items like food and beverages that require specific temperature-controlled environments and managing inventory based on best-before or use-by dates.
• Serialized goods: Managing items that require individual traceability via unique serial numbers.

CartonCloud’s e-commerce WMS is built with flexibility in mind, so you can support a wide range of customer and product types, even while scaling into new markets.

Let’s take a look at the top e-commerce WMS workflows to let you achieve high volume e-commerce fulfillment with ease, across a range of order types! 

The Top WMS Workflows to Optimize 3PL E-commerce

Let’s look at how your 3PL clients' customer expectations can be used to define your fulfillment strategy for the most streamlined operations. To win and retain e-commerce clients, you need a fulfillment operation that’s fast, accurate, and responsive. That means:

• Receiving orders in real-time
• Picking, packing, and shipping with speed and precision
• Providing real-time tracking updates to end customers

Fulfillment for Identical Orders Using Split Pick and Pack 

Scenario: You're facing a surge of orders during peak periods — such as during flash sales, product launches, or seasonal rushes — for the same product. You need a way to process these quickly without slowing down.

Top E-commerce Workflow: Use Split Pick and Pack to fulfill large volumes of identical orders (with a quantity of 1) in one trip.

Split Pick and Pack lets you quickly search and group all orders containing the same single product, so your team can pick them all in one efficient warehouse run.

Streamline Multi-Item Orders with Ease with Pick to Tote

Scenario: You’re managing a high volume of orders, each containing multiple different items. Your team needs a fast, accurate way to pick and sort without errors or delays.

Top E-commerce Workflow: Use Pick to Tote to pick multiple orders in a single pass — while keeping each order separated and organized into their own tote for easy packing.

This feature allows you to set your Pick to Tote batch size based on your trolley’s capacity (e.g., 30 totes = 30 orders), and then go along to place each item into its assigned tote. 

Once you’ve completed the picking step, you can scan each tote barcode to directly pack that entire order — making e-commerce order processing seamless from start to finish.

For Andres Fernandez at Birch 3PL, Pick to Tote has been an essential e-commerce workflow to support their e-com operations.

“We’ve recently implemented the new Pick to Tote functionality in CartonCloud, and it’s been a great addition to our warehouse operations. As a 3PL working with B2C eCommerce clients, this feature is a must-have—so we’re very happy to now have it in place.

Since going live, we’ve seen a noticeable improvement in picking accuracy, and the packing process is much faster now that items don’t need to be sorted at the packing bench.” — Andres Fernandez, Birch3PL

E-commerce Workflows for your Industry Niche

1. Food & beverage

Scenario: You’re managing stock for a food and beverage client who requires both cold and ambient storage. To meet their expectations, you need to maintain strict temperature controls and follow food safety standards — ensuring every product is stored correctly and handled with care to protect its integrity.

Top E-commerce Workflow: Use CartonCloud’s Temperature Zone feature to easily set up specific areas in your warehouse for frozen, chilled, or ambient products and create rules to ensure items are properly allocated to the correct warehouse location.

“We have many different areas in our warehouse that have ambient temperature but also temperature controlled. [CartonCloud] allows us to see what type of space we have available for that customer and directs us exactly where to place [the stock] in the warehouse.” - Cass Strunk, Founder, Core Logistic Services

CartonCloud also makes charging for food and beverage storage easy – you can set different rates based on zone, ensuring you track and charge each item correctly.

2. Health & medical items 

Scenario: You're managing inventory with expiry or best-before dates — such as supplements, pharmaceuticals, or medical supplies — and need to ensure the right products are dispatched at the right time to minimize waste and stay compliant.

Top E-commerce Workflow: Use CartonCloud’s Batch Control and/or Serial Tracking feature to track expiry dates and serial numbers for different SKUs (you can also use temperature zones as mentioned above for this scenario depending on your product requirements).Based on your needs, you can track your inventory expiry dates and serialized goods using automated picking logic like FIFO (First In, First Out), FEFO (First Expired, First Out), or FILO (First In, Last Out). When it’s time to pick, your team is guided to select the correct stock based on expiry dates — boosting your accuracy and reducing the risk of sending expired items.

You can also track inventory using detailed identifiers like batch numbers, lot numbers, serial numbers, and production dates.

For health and medical products, serial tracking is especially valuable — it not only helps identify which items should be picked first, but also ensures your orders are fulfilled with accuracy.

CartonCloud’s WMS software for 3PLs allows you to set verification checkpoints where pickers must scan serial numbers in order to pick. If an incorrect serial is scanned, the system instantly flags the error, so your team immediately knows they need to find the correct item.

Learn more about how top performing warehouses are tracking inventory.

Prepare Packages for Dispatch Right from your Mobile Phone

Scenario: You’re at the packing stage and need to generate shipping labels as well as provide your customers with tracking information from carriers.

Top E-commerce Workflow: Use CartonCloud’s Pack Screen to bulk-print shipping labels and automatically generate consignment labels through your preferred shipping platform.

CartonCloud integrates with major carriers and shipping aggregators like Shippit, StarShippit, Sendle, and Macship, enabling your shipping jobs to be created automatically. Plus, all relevant shipping and tracking details are instantly pushed to the carrier, so you can keep things moving without delay!

One of the great WMS software benefits with CartonCloud is enhanced visibility — with CartonCloud’s customer portal, your customers can track their orders at every stage of the process, improving transparency and trust in your service.

Key Takeaways

• By using the right e-commerce workflows, you can manage high-volume e-commerce pick and pack, boost accuracy, and grow your 3PL business — all without needing to add extra systems to your tech stack.
• CartonCloud’s flexible e-commerce workflows make it easy to scale and branch into new, specialized e-commerce markets with confidence.

Want to know more?

See how CartonCloud's e-commerce WMS can equip your 3PL with top workflow automations in e-commerce, empowering you to confidently expand into new industries and scale your business with ease. Book your free demo today to see each e-commerce workflow in action!