Services overview
Warpspeed runs direct-to-consumer pick-and-pack, retailer-compliant B2B distribution, freight, returns, cross-dock, and kitting from a single facility in Kansas City. One inventory pool, one team, one operating system, every channel a brand sells through.
TL;DR
Warpspeed is a third-party logistics provider for brands that have outgrown a garage, a 5,000-square-foot warehouse, or a 3PL that treats every account the same. Most of our clients ship somewhere between 5,000 and 250,000 orders per month and split volume across at least two channels. A typical customer might run 70 percent DTC through Shopify, 20 percent through Amazon FBM and Walmart Marketplace, and 10 percent through wholesale to a regional grocery chain.
Brands like that get failed by the two ends of the market. Hyperscale 3PLs price for Fortune 500 vendors and cannot handle the mix of order types without charging for every exception. Small regional 3PLs run a single channel well and break the moment a Target purchase order shows up demanding GS1-128 labels and a 60-minute ASN window. We sit in the middle: large enough to absorb peak volume, small enough to actually answer the phone.
The reason we operate from Kansas City is geography, not nostalgia. The metro sits within a two-day ground transit radius of about 85 percent of the US population, which is more than any other major logistics hub in the country.[2]For brands that care about transit time but cannot justify a multi-node network, that math wins. A package leaving our dock on Tuesday is on a doorstep in Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, Minneapolis, or Tampa by end of day Thursday on ground rates.
Volume in the US parcel market keeps growing despite a flatter Q1 2025. Pitney Bowes recorded 22.4 billion parcels shipped in 2024 and projects 30.5 billion by 2030 at a 5 percent compound annual growth rate.[1] The brands that win that decade are not the ones with the cheapest pick fee. They are the ones whose fulfillment partner can shift inventory between DTC, FBA prep, Walmart DSV, and a wholesale pallet program without rebuilding the warehouse each time.
Each service below has a dedicated page with carrier mix, SLA detail, pricing model, and what makes it different. Read the one that matches the channel you are scaling first.
Pick-and-pack for direct-to-consumer brands. Same-day cutoffs at 2 PM CT, branded unboxing, full carrier rate shopping.
EDI-native retailer compliance. Walmart, Target, Costco, Whole Foods, Kroger routing guides handled in-house.
Fast-transit programs that combine our central location with regional carrier networks. Honest math on when same-day pays off.
Inbound container drayage, LTL outbound to retail DCs, full-truckload moves to your forward-stocking nodes.
Inspection, grading, restocking, refurbishment, and disposition. Full visibility into what is coming back and why.
Subscription box assembly, pre-pack bundles, retail display kits, FBA prep, polybagging, sticker application.
Most multichannel brands end up with a fulfillment model that looks like duct tape. DTC sits with one 3PL, FBA prep with another, retail compliance with a third, freight with a broker, returns with a refurb shop in Ohio. Each handoff adds a rebill, a transfer cost, and a window where inventory is invisible.
The Warpspeed model collapses that. One inbound receiving lane handles a 40-foot container, a UPS ground replenishment from a vendor, and a customer return. One inventory record represents that SKU regardless of whether it ships next as a single DTC parcel, a 12-pack case to Whole Foods, or a 144-eaches floor-loaded trailer to a Walmart DC. One billing run consolidates pick fees, storage, accessorials, freight, and value-added services for the month.
“Inventory should not change identity when the channel changes. The pallet you received yesterday is the same pallet whether it ships tonight as 80 DTC orders or tomorrow as a Walmart pickup.”
Operationally, that means our pick paths route the same wave through different pack lanes. A B2C order goes to a parcel station with branded boxes and an automated dim-weight scale. A B2B order from the same SKU on the same wave routes to a case-pack lane with GS1-128 carton labels and an automatic ASN generation. The DC operator never has to think about which channel a unit belongs to until the pick label prints.
Kansas City exists as a logistics hub for the same reason it became a railroad town in the 1870s: it sits at the seam between the eastern and western halves of the country. The metro is the second-largest rail hub in the United States by tonnage, sees BNSF and Union Pacific intermodal traffic daily, and is geographically positioned so that a ground parcel can reach roughly 85 percent of US households in two transit days.[2]
For shippers who have done the multi-node math, Kansas City often wins single-node distribution outright. The classic alternative, two nodes on the coasts, costs roughly twice as much in fixed warehouse overhead and adds inventory carrying cost from holding the same SKU in two places. A KC node hits the 1-2 day window without the duplication, and only loses to a true coast deployment for very high-volume DTC brands shipping more than ~40,000 orders a week.
Approximate ground transit days from Kansas City
| Destination | UPS Ground | FedEx Home | USPS Ground Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago, IL | 1 day | 1 day | 1-2 days |
| Dallas, TX | 1 day | 1 day | 1-2 days |
| Atlanta, GA | 2 days | 2 days | 2-3 days |
| Denver, CO | 2 days | 2 days | 2-3 days |
| Phoenix, AZ | 2 days | 2 days | 3 days |
| Los Angeles, CA | 3 days | 3 days | 3-4 days |
| New York, NY | 2 days | 2 days | 3 days |
| Seattle, WA | 3 days | 3 days | 3-4 days |
The transit times above are commercial business-day estimates. Actual SLAs depend on the day-of-week pickup, carrier service-level commitments, and the volume tier on the customer rate card. For brands shipping more than 1,000 parcels per day, our team builds a custom transit-time map by ZIP cluster during onboarding.
A 3PL that claims to handle every category equally well is usually not great at any of them. Warpspeed deliberately specializes in a handful of verticals where our facility, carrier mix, and software actually create an advantage. Outside those categories we tell prospective clients to look elsewhere.
USPS Ground Advantage and Priority Mail Cubic dominate the rate-shop. Polybag pick lanes, branded mailers, integrated returns flow back to inspect-and-restock.
FDA-registered facility, lot tracking, FIFO with shelf-life logic, and refrigerated trailer staging for retail outbound. Cold-chain capable up to 100 pallet positions.
ORM-D and limited-quantity hazmat handling for aerosols and flammables. Branded gift-with-purchase kit assembly. Influencer PR mailer programs.
Serialized SKU tracking, MAC and IMEI capture, RMA and refurbishment, anti-static packaging stations. Bulk component receipt for kitting.
Oversize parcel handling, LTL freight outbound to consumer addresses, white-glove coordination with regional final-mile carriers.
Multi-SKU kit assembly at scale. Hub-and-spoke kitting waves that consolidate 30+ components into a branded box on a 24-hour cycle.
Three line items: receiving, storage, and pick-pack-ship. Optional accessorials only if you actually use them. We publish a worked example on each service page so a finance lead can model the unit economics in 15 minutes without an SOW.
Industry context: most DTC fulfillment programs land in the $3 to $7 per order range plus storage, with the spread driven by SKU count, average pick lines per order, and packaging complexity.[4] Our rates fall inside that band. We do not discount the first month, then quietly raise the rate at year two.
Every customer gets a portal with real-time inventory, order status, batch and lot detail, returns intake, and an analytics view that maps pick fees and shipping spend to SKU. The portal is the same one our operations team uses on the floor. There is no parallel system that ops sees and customers do not.
Integrations are pre-built for Shopify, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, Amazon Seller Central, Amazon Vendor Central, Walmart Marketplace, Walmart Drop Ship Vendor, Target Plus, eBay, TikTok Shop, NetSuite, SPS Commerce, and TrueCommerce. EDI is native, not bolted on through a translator.
Talk to operations
Onboarding is built around your launch date, not ours. The shortest go-live in the last twelve months was eleven business days from contract signature to first DTC shipment. Most clients land in the four-to-six-week range, which includes a clean inventory transfer and a sandbox test on every channel.
Sources
All services
Every fulfillment, warehousing, and transportation capability we publish a dedicated page for.