Built for 3PLs

The Multi-Tenant 3PL Portal

Q: How does pricing work for a 3PL with multiple brands?

You pay one subscription as the 3PL operator covering your organization. There are no per-brand fees — onboard as many brand clients as you need. Per-label shipping costs pass through at your negotiated carrier rates (or your shared rate pool). Optional add-ons like high-volume label purchasing are available, but the core multi-brand portal is included.

Q: How many brands can I run on one organization?

There is no hard cap. Customers run anywhere from 3 to 80+ brand clients on a single ShipWave organization. The architecture scales horizontally — each brand is fully isolated at the data layer, so you do not see performance degradation as you add more.

Q: Can I customize the brand portal beyond logo and colors?

Yes. Each brand portal supports custom logo, primary/secondary colors, custom domain (portal.brandname.com), custom email sender (no-reply@brandname.com), custom tracking page copy, custom returns portal copy, and a custom favicon. For deeper customization, the white-label CSS and HTML hooks are exposed.

Q: How does billing work for my brand clients?

You configure a per-brand rate sheet (storage, pick fees, pack fees, receiving, kit assembly, returns). Charges accrue automatically as warehouse activity happens. On the first of each month, Stripe generates a branded invoice with full line-item detail and emails it to your brand client. They pay via ACH or card, funds settle to your connected Stripe account.

Q: Can each brand use their own carrier accounts?

Yes. Add UPS, FedEx, USPS, or DHL account credentials at the brand level. All labels purchased for that brand’s orders bill to their carrier contract, not yours. You can also use your shared rate pool and apply a per-brand markup if you prefer.

Q: What if I need a feature ShipHero/ShipBob has that you don’t?

Tell us. The team ships product weekly and prioritizes the 3PL-specific feature gaps actively. Most missing features in the WMS-adjacent space (cycle counts, lot tracking, FEFO picking, wave picking) are already live. Anything missing typically ships within a quarter for paying 3PL customers.

Q: How do I migrate from ShipHero/ShipBob/Extensiv?

White-glove migration is included for 3PL plans. We export inventory, open orders, and historical shipment data from your current platform, run a parallel period (typically 1–2 weeks of dual-write), and cut over on your selected go-live date. Most migrations complete in 2–4 weeks depending on the number of brands.

Run every brand you fulfill for under one organization. Brand-scoped staff, white-label subdomains, custom domains, and per-brand Stripe-issued invoices — the operating system ShipHero and ShipBob never built.

Get Started Free Get in Touch

Multi-Tenant

One Org, Many Brands

Isolated data, shared infrastructure

6 Roles

RBAC Built In

Brand-scoped staff access

Custom Domains

White-Label Portal

{brand}.shipwave.app or yours

Stripe Billing

Per-Brand Invoices

Monthly auto-generated

Benefits

Why Businesses Choose This Feature

True Multi-Tenant Architecture: Each brand you fulfill for gets its own portal, its own orders, its own inventory, and its own customer-facing tracking — but you manage everything from one operator dashboard. No more juggling separate WMS instances per client.
White-Label Branded Portals: Every brand gets a {brand}.shipwave.app subdomain or maps to a custom domain like portal.theirbrand.com. Their logo, their colors, their tracking emails. Your customers never see ShipWave — and never see each other.
Brand-Scoped Staff & RBAC: Six roles out of the box (Owner, Admin, Operator, Picker, ReadOnly, Customer). Assign staff to specific brands, restrict warehouse access, and audit every action with a full immutable log. SOC 2 ready from day one.
3PL Billing Engine: Per-brand rate sheets covering storage (per cubic foot), pick fees, pack fees, B2B receiving, returns processing, and kit assembly. Charges accrue daily. Stripe-issued invoices go out monthly with line-item PDFs — no spreadsheets, no manual reconciliation.
Per-Brand Carrier Accounts: Bring each brand’s own UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL account numbers. Shipments bill back to the brand’s carrier contract, not yours. Or use the ShipWave-negotiated rate pool and mark up per brand.
Immutable Audit Log: Every label purchase, every inventory adjustment, every refund, every role change — recorded with actor, timestamp, IP, and before/after state. Defensible audit trail for compliance audits, dispute claims, and insurance.

How the 3PL Portal Works

Onboard the Brand

Create a brand under your organization, set its subdomain, upload its logo, connect its Shopify/Amazon stores, and pick a rate sheet. Done in under 10 minutes per brand.

Assign Staff & Carriers

Invite warehouse operators scoped to specific brands. Add the brand’s own carrier accounts or apply your shared accounts with a markup. Lock down RBAC permissions per role.

Operate & Invoice

Pick, pack, and ship from one operator dashboard. Charges accrue automatically. On the first of every month, Stripe sends a branded invoice with itemized fulfillment activity to each brand client.

Why 3PL Operators Are Replacing ShipHero and ShipBob

WMS-Only Tools Leave Money on the Table

ShipHero, ShipBob, and Extensiv built warehouse management systems — and then bolted on partial 3PL workflows years later. The result is a tool that picks and packs well but punts on the parts that actually make a 3PL profitable: per-brand billing, multi-brand carrier accounts, white-label customer-facing portals, and brand-isolated staff access. Operators end up running QuickBooks for invoicing, separate Shopify accounts per brand, custom-built tracking pages, and an Excel sheet to track storage fees. ShipWave was built multi-tenant from the first commit — every model has an organization scope, every API call is brand-aware, and billing is a first-class feature, not an integration.

Brand Isolation That Actually Works

Multi-tenancy isn’t a marketing word — it’s a data architecture decision. In ShipWave, every order, shipment, return, inventory adjustment, and customer record is tagged with both an organization ID and a brand ID. Staff scoped to Brand A literally cannot query Brand B’s data — the database query layer rejects it before the API even responds. This matters when a brand requests a SOC 2 report, when an operator gets fired, or when one brand’s lawyer asks for a data export. You hand them a clean dataset with zero cross-contamination. ShipHero stores everything in shared tables with a brand_id filter — one bug in a query and the wrong brand sees the wrong data. We architected around that exact failure mode.

White-Label Done Right

Every brand gets a {brand}.shipwave.app subdomain provisioned automatically. Want to host on the brand’s own domain like portal.brandname.com? Add a CNAME record, drop the domain into the brand settings, and ShipWave provisions the TLS certificate via Let’s Encrypt automatically. The customer-facing tracking pages, returns portal, and order lookup all serve under the brand’s domain with the brand’s logo, colors, and email-sender identity. End customers never see ShipWave branding. Operators see the unified back-end. That separation — clean customer-facing brand identity with consolidated operator tooling — is what makes a 3PL look like 50 brands to the outside world and one efficient operation to the inside.

Billing That Doesn’t Need a Bookkeeper

The most common reason 3PLs leave their existing platform is billing. Tracking storage by cubic foot, billing pick fees per unit, charging different rates for B2B vs DTC pick-and-pack, handling kit assembly time, prorating returns processing — that all happens in someone’s Excel sheet today. ShipWave’s billing engine has per-brand rate sheets with line items for storage (per cubic foot per day), receiving (per pallet or per carton), picks (per unit, with B2B/DTC tiers), packs (per box, with priority tiers), kit assembly (per kit, by complexity), and returns processing. Charges accrue automatically as warehouse activity happens. On the first of each month, Stripe Issuing generates a branded PDF invoice per brand with full line-item detail. Brand pays via ACH or card. You stop chasing receivables and start collecting on autopilot.

RBAC Beyond Standard Roles

Six built-in roles cover the common cases: Owner (everything), Admin (everything except billing), Operator (warehouse floor actions), Picker (pick-and-scan only), ReadOnly (dashboards and reports), and Customer (brand client login to view their own data). But role assignment is brand-scoped — a Picker at Warehouse A working for Brand 1 cannot see Brand 2 orders, cannot access Warehouse B, and cannot adjust inventory outside their assigned location. Add IP allowlists for billing/admin actions, require 2FA for high-risk roles, and review the immutable audit log to investigate any anomaly. This is the role model big-box 3PLs spend $200K building in-house — included from day one.

ShipWave 3PL Portal vs. ShipHero

Built multi-tenant from day one — not bolted on after the fact.

Feature	ShipWave	ShipHero / ShipBob
Multi-brand architecture	Native — every record brand-scoped	Bolted on — shared tables with brand filter
White-label subdomains	Free, included, auto-TLS	Enterprise tier upcharge
Custom domain mapping	CNAME + auto TLS	Not supported or custom-quote
3PL billing engine	Per-brand rate sheets + Stripe invoices	Spreadsheets or QuickBooks integration
Per-brand carrier accounts	Bring your own per brand	Limited — shared account default
Brand-scoped RBAC	6 roles, brand + warehouse scoped	Org-wide roles only
Audit log	Immutable, every action, exportable	Limited to billing actions
Onboarding new brand	<10 minutes self-serve	Sales-led setup, days-weeks

3PL Portal Includes

Everything you need to operate a multi-brand fulfillment business — no add-ons, no enterprise tier.

Unlimited brands per organization (no per-brand fee)
Per-brand white-label subdomain ({brand}.shipwave.app)
Custom domain mapping with automatic TLS provisioning
Per-brand logo, colors, email sender, and tracking page branding
Per-brand carrier accounts (UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, regional carriers)
Per-brand Stripe-issued monthly invoices with line-item PDFs
Configurable rate sheets (storage, pick, pack, receiving, kit assembly, returns)
Six RBAC roles with brand + warehouse + role scoping
Immutable audit log with actor, timestamp, IP, and state changes
Brand-scoped reporting and operator dashboards
Brand client login portal (read-only view of their own orders/inventory)
API tokens scoped per brand for client integrations

Who Uses the 3PL Portal

Specialized 3PLs

Niche operators serving apparel, supplements, electronics, or beauty brands run 10–100 brand clients on ShipWave. Each brand sees their own portal, their own data, and their own monthly invoice.

Founder-Led Fulfillment Studios

Small 3PLs serving 3–15 portfolio brands replace ShipHero + QuickBooks + custom tracking pages with one tool. Onboard a new brand in an hour, not a week.

Brand Holding Companies

Multi-brand DTC parent companies (Pattern Brands, BrandX-style portfolios) consolidate operations across their portfolio while keeping each brand’s customer experience fully separate.

Amazon Prep Centers

FBA prep centers track inbound from many seller clients, bill per unit prepped, and hand back FNSKU-labeled inventory ready for shipment to Amazon FCs. Each seller gets their own login and their own invoice.

Cross-Border Fulfillment

US-Canada and US-EU cross-border 3PLs use per-brand carrier accounts (some on FedEx, some on DHL, some on Canpar) to ship out of one warehouse with brand-specific carrier rules and customs paperwork.

Subscription-Box 3PLs

Operators fulfilling monthly boxes for multiple subscription brands handle kit assembly billing per box, per-SKU storage, and box-launch shipping spikes — all with brand-scoped reporting.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does pricing work for a 3PL with multiple brands?

You pay one subscription as the 3PL operator covering your organization. There are no per-brand fees — onboard as many brand clients as you need. Per-label shipping costs pass through at your negotiated carrier rates (or your shared rate pool). Optional add-ons like high-volume label purchasing are available, but the core multi-brand portal is included.

How many brands can I run on one organization?

There is no hard cap. Customers run anywhere from 3 to 80+ brand clients on a single ShipWave organization. The architecture scales horizontally — each brand is fully isolated at the data layer, so you do not see performance degradation as you add more.

Can I customize the brand portal beyond logo and colors?