It is 9:47 AM on a Tuesday in Shenzhen, and a pallet of yoga mats has just arrived from a factory two hours away. By 6:00 PM, some of these mats will be packed, labeled, and loaded onto trucks headed to air freight. Within the week, they will land in Seattle, Toronto, and Austin.
Most DTC brands never see inside their fulfillment operations. Products disappear into a 3PL somewhere and reappear as tracking numbers weeks later.
Direct fulfillment makes the invisible, visible. When your fulfillment center sits close in proximity to your factory instead of two months away by ocean freight, you unlock operational advantages that are not possible inside traditional 3PL networks.
Here is what happens inside the Portless Shenzhen facility on a day-to-day basis.
A pallet of product from one of our hundreds of ecommerce customers arrives at the Portless Fulfillment Center. The receiving team unloads it, verifies items against the purchase order, and inspects every single unit. Products that pass receive barcodes. Anything defective enters a hold area.
This proximity matters. When an ecommerce brand ships units with a fault, the defect can be caught in receiving. The team returned the batch to the factory the same afternoon. Corrected units came back the next day.
As our Solutions Engineer put it:
“Catching defects early is everything. If we find an issue at receiving in the morning, the factory can fix it before the day ends. That is impossible when inventory arrives six weeks later in a different country.”
In a traditional import model, that same defect is found six weeks later in a domestic 3PL. Shipping it back is too expensive. Brands often scrap the inventory, liquidate it, or send it to customers and deal with returns.
What this means for your brand:
After inspection, forklifts move pallets into the shelf storage area. Inventory is organized by SKU and tracked through the Portless warehouse management system (WMS). Every movement is updated through barcode scanning.
Every time a product moves, staff scan it. Every scan updates the system in real time. No manual entry means no transcription errors, no mistyped SKUs, no quantity mistakes. When you log into your Portless dashboard, inventory counts reflect reality, not estimates.
The operational impact:
High velocity SKUs move from bulk storage into the picking area. The goal is to reduce walking distance and increase pick and pack throughput. A picker grabbing an item 10 feet away instead of 50 feet away seems small. Across 500 orders, that's 4 miles of walking eliminated per shift.
When stock runs low, the WMS triggers replenishment. Pickers scan each item into bins, with each bin representing a single customer order.
Why operators care:
Bins arrive at packing stations. Packers scan items again to confirm accuracy. They follow each brand's specific packaging requirements:
Cameras monitor every packing station. If a customer reports a wrong item or damage, the team can pull the exact clip. Weight checks add a final safeguard. If a package weighs less than expected, it is flagged before leaving the facility.
The real advantage:
After packing, packages move down a conveyor to the logistics area where Portless sorts shipments across more than 20 last mile carriers. Each carrier has a dedicated zone.
Our internal order management system chooses the optimal carrier based on real time performance. A shipment to Vancouver, Canada may route differently than one to Miami, Florida even if both were packed minutes apart.
Most 3PLs rely on one or two carriers. Portless routes dynamically.
How this improves your supply chain and package shipping:
Between 5:00 and 6:00 PM, carriers arrive to collect packages organized into woven logistics sacks. Orders packed before cutoff make same day flights through Shenzhen or Hong Kong airport. This supports a typical 6 to 9 day delivery window from Asia to North America.
For your bottom line:
Customers never see their order as an international shipment. Tracking activates immediately for customers and is handed off to familiar North American carriers for the last mile. For the customer, the experience looks and feels like a standard domestic delivery.
Many brands prefer not to reveal where products are sourced or manufactured. Direct fulfillment supports this preference. When packages land in-country, a domestic last mile tracking sticker is applied. Customers only see updates from their local carrier and not the overseas origin unless a brand chooses to disclose it. This matters for brands positioning themselves as premium or domestic-focused without explicitly stating manufacturing origin.
What this means for customer trust:
Direct fulfillment is not magic. It is operational and supply chain optimization. Shorter distances reduce idle time. Fewer transfer points mean fewer handoffs. Better routing improves speed and accuracy.
When direct fulfillment works:
For Shopify native companies that manufacture in Asia and sell primarily in North America, the operational lift is meaningful when:
Factory adjacent fulfillment changes your inventory strategy, your cash flow rhythm, and your customer experience. The mechanics described above are what make that possible.
Ready to tighten your supply chain and ship globally without the heavy inventory model?
Portless can help you make direct fulfillment part of your growth strategy.
Talk to us about how direct-from-factory fulfillment fits your brand’s next stage.
