Co-warehousing Drives Ecommerce Logistics Sophistication
Tyler Scriven, CEO of Saltbox, on co-warehousing and D2C ecommerce
The pandemic did not just pull more sales online, it forced merchants to professionalize the unglamorous work of storing, picking, packing, and routing inventory much earlier in their life cycle. In practice, that meant brands graduating from bedrooms and self storage units into software guided warehouse workflows, on demand labor, and nearby fulfillment nodes, because shipping speed, accuracy, and reliability became part of the product, not just a back office task.
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For Saltbox, sophistication starts with replacing improvised operations. The core customer is a $100,000 to $5M ecommerce brand that used to run fulfillment from home or patch together carriers and labor, then moves into a small warehouse suite, shared labor pool, and eventually outsourced fulfillment inside the same network.
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The bigger shift is modular logistics. Saltbox describes the stack as software, services, infrastructure, and capital, then sells different combinations of those pieces as a merchant grows. That fills the missing middle between doing everything manually and handing inventory to a large, rigid 3PL built for scale rather than flexibility.
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This same maturation shows up across the market. ShipBob grew from scheduled pickups for SMBs into a 50 warehouse fulfillment network with revenue reaching $500M in 2023, monetizing receiving, storage, pick and pack labor, and shipping. Ecommerce logistics is becoming a full stack operating layer, not a single shipping service.
The next phase is more segmented infrastructure, with local co-warehousing and micro-fulfillment for smaller brands, and denser full service hubs for merchants that outgrow them. The winners will be the operators that make each step up in complexity feel natural, because once a merchant’s workflows, staff instructions, and inventory are embedded in one system, switching becomes much harder.