Fulfilment
Find merchants whose shipping is about to become their bottleneck
For 3PL providers, fulfilment networks and freight forwarders
The problem
The best fulfilment prospect is a merchant just past the point where shipping from a garage stops working. That moment is invisible from the outside: until you look at catalogue size, international reach and shipping terms together.
How the data solves it
Filter for merchants with a large catalogue that ship internationally to a meaningful number of countries. Cross-reference the shipping partners they name and their free-shipping threshold: a low threshold with wide reach means margin pressure they can feel.
The filter set this maps to
Every field below exists in the shop schema. This is the query, not an illustration.
- Ships International
- yes
- Ships to number of countries
- > 10
- Products
- > 200
- Shipping partners
- named carriers
Build it
Four steps to this list
Every column named here exists in the schema, and the request below runs as written.
- 1Set ships_intl to yes.
- 2Add ships_to >= 10 for merchants with genuine international reach.
- 3Add products >= 200 to find catalogues large enough to strain self-fulfilment.
- 4Export shipping_partners and free_ship_over to see the incumbent and the margin pressure.
The same query through the API
POST this to /api/v1/search for a count, or /api/v1/rows for the shops themselves.
{
"filters": [
{
"kind": "dropdown",
"col": "ships_intl",
"values": [
"yes"
]
},
{
"kind": "numeric",
"col": "ships_to",
"op": "gte",
"min": 10
},
{
"kind": "numeric",
"col": "products",
"op": "gte",
"min": 200
}
]
}Playbook
What to do once you have the list
A list is not a campaign. These are the three things that decide whether it converts.
Read the incumbent first
shipping_partners tells you who they use today where they publish it. A pitch that ignores the incumbent reads as a mailshot.
Use free_ship_over as a margin signal
A low free-shipping threshold with wide international reach means the merchant is absorbing cost they can feel. That is your opening.
Match country to warehouse
Filter destination markets against your own footprint so you only approach merchants you can actually serve better.
Outcome
What you end up with
Merchants shipping widely enough to need real logistics
Visibility of incumbent carriers before the first call
Country-level targeting matched to your warehouse footprint
Questions
Logistics: frequently asked
Can I target by the countries a shop ships to?
Yes. Shops record both whether they ship internationally and the number of destination countries, so you can match prospects to the regions your network actually serves.
How do I know who their current provider is?
The shipping partners field captures carriers named on the storefront where the merchant publishes them. Coverage varies, because not every shop discloses it.
What actually signals that a merchant has outgrown their fulfilment?
Three things together, none of them convincing alone: a catalogue big enough that picking takes real time, shipping to many destination countries, and international shipping switched on. A shop sending 40 products to two countries is fine. The same catalogue going to 30 countries is doing customs paperwork by hand.
Can I see who a merchant currently ships with?
Often, yes. The shipping partners field records carriers named on the storefront, usually in the shipping policy or at checkout. It is not complete, because plenty of shops never name a carrier publicly, so treat a blank as unknown rather than as nobody.
How do I avoid approaching merchants who already use a 3PL?
Exclude the shipping partners you compete with by name, and treat a shop that names no carrier at all as the more promising signal. A merchant self-fulfilling from a unit is far more likely to be feeling the pain than one already paying somebody to handle it.
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