Rethinking D2C Ecommerce Fulfillment: Smarter Options for Brands

Legacy brands are waking up to a new reality: it’s not just about selling through retail anymore. Ecommerce has reshaped how customers shop, how fast they expect delivery, and how directly they want to engage with the brands they trust.

The shift to direct-to-consumer (D2C) isn’t optional. It’s table stakes.

But there’s a catch. Scaling D2C fulfillment the traditional way – through owned warehouses, third-party logistics (3PLs), or Amazon’s FBA network – can be expensive, complex, and slow to launch.

The question most brands face today isn’t whether to go D2C. It’s how to do it without blowing up the budget, breaking existing systems, or losing control of the customer experience.

That’s where The Distribution Network (TDN) comes in.

This post walks through the D2C fulfillment paths available to brands – what works, what breaks, and why a smarter alternative might already be hiding in plain sight: your existing distributors

Why D2C Ecommerce for Brands?

Even if retail is your main channel, customers still expect to find you online – in fact, research shows that consumers prefer to buy directly from brands online.

That’s great news for brands. D2C selling has several other advantages when included as part of a brand's distribution strategy.

Own the Customer Relationship: D2C gives you direct access to your customers – how they shop, what they buy, what they might want next. As cookies disappear and ad platforms tighten, first-party data becomes a valuable asset. D2C gives you insights into behavior, preferences, lifetime value, and more – all of which power smarter decisions and better marketing.

Reduce Channel Risk: Retailer consolidation. Shifting shelf space. Marketplace policy changes. All of these can hit your business overnight. A strong D2C channel acts as a hedge – building resilience into your revenue model.

Expand Product Reach Through Dropshipping: While most people think D2C ecommerce only refers to selling product directly to consumers, in a broader sense, it’s really about fulfilling products directly to consumers…even if you weren’t the one making the actual sale.

Online sales channels pride themselves on creating an “endless aisle” shopping experience – offering shoppers a broad product selection they could never hope to stock themselves. They depend on having their brand vendors drop shipping product to fulfill orders.

And even brick-and-mortar retail locations often prefer having a “floor model” but not actually stocking large or bulky items that would hog warehouse space. They’ll sell your product, but expect you to deliver it through drop shipping. If you can D2C dropship, you can vastly increase the visibility of your entire product line.

You Don’t Need a Warehouse. You Need a Rethink

Most brands follow the same script: Want to scale D2C ecommerce? They think about…

Using existing warehouses or build new warehouses or distribution centers.

Hiring 3PL.

Enrolling in Amazon FBA or other channel fulfillment options.

At Etail, we work with branded warehouses and DC, 3PLs and the brands they serve, and with brands heavily dependent on FBA. These are all viable options – and they are not mutually exclusive.

But there’s a newer, smarter way to consider. One that costs less, moves faster, and builds on what you already have.

What If Your Distributors Could Do the Job?

As a brand, you may already have product sitting in warehouses across the country – inside the regional distribution network you’ve built over the years.

Those distributors already serve your retailers. They already have the space, the staff, and the systems.

So why not let them fulfill D2C orders too?

That’s the idea behind The Distribution Network (TDN).

TDN connects your brand to your existing distributors through a modern tech layer – making it possible to route, fulfill, and ship ecommerce orders directly from their shelves.

It’s a smarter use of the assets and partners you already trust.

The Real Choice: Compare the Options

Thinking of expanding your D2C capabilities? Let’s break the options down.

Build it Yourself

This is an obvious choice for most brands getting started in D2C fulfillment.

But there are a couple of major roadblocks.

Amazon has trained ecommerce shoppers to expect their product delivered in 2-3 days at little or no cost. That means you’ll need to stock inventory at multiple locations near your consumers. That cuts delivery time and expense. But your current facilities may not be the ideal locations and building new ones takes time and a massive capital investment.

Building your own D2C fulfillment options sounds straightforward – but it’s rarely fast, cheap, or flexible.

Your current Operations folks also have spent years developing and optimizing workflows designed around shipping pallets or cases to stable, defined locations like your retail customer’s distribution centers. D2C demands the capability to pick-and-pack individual orders – hopefully thousands of them a day – to unique, individual customer locations. So you’ll also need to pick the best carrier for each order, print individual labels and packing slips, and provide shipping and tracking information to your sales channels.

Developing, training, and managing the workflows? Doable, but it will take time.

Outsource to 3PLs

Hiring 3PLs to fulfill products solves the multiple location issue created by owning or building your own warehouses and DCs. You can hire 3PLs to fill the gaps. And, with the growth of ecommerce, many 3PLs have developed a high degree of expertise in ecommerce fulfillment – especially for tough challenges like cold-storage fulfillment or building subscription boxes.

3PLs offer convenience, but that convenience comes at a price – and a lot of complexity

But 3PLs often have their own issues:

Expensive, Fixed-Cost Contracts: Finding the right 3PLs, negotiating the arrangement, establishing KPIs, and managing them long-term demands specialized experience. Or at least the tolerance for making what could be expensive mistakes as you learn.

Long Onboarding Cycles: 3PLs need to integrate their systems with your sales channels and order and inventory management system. That takes time and expertise for both you and the 3PL. And, since the 3PL owns the tech stack, changing 3PLs if you make a mistake can be a painful, expensive process.

Little Flexibility: 3PLs are in an intensively competitive industry with tight margins. So 3PLs tend to get very good at doing very specific things profitably, which might not fit everything in your product line.

You’re One of Many: As a brand newly getting into D2C, you may not have the volume to be a priority once the deal is inked.

Still, combining 3PLs to fill in geographic gaps with existing warehouse locations can make sense. But onboarding is time-consuming and expensive. And make the wrong choice in a 3PL partner? By contract, it’s going to take time to fix while you look for alternatives.

Let Walmart or Amazon Handle It

Amazon FBA Multichannel Fulfillment and Walmart Multichannel Solutions are really just super 3PLs using the vast Amazon and Walmart warehouse networks to fulfill D2C orders. And both services can be used to ship products not sold through their platform. For the right products, they can be a good – if expensive – choice.

Amazon and Walmart make it easy to plug in. But that plug-in power means giving up control – and margin.

Convenience comes at a cost when using sales channel fulfillment options.

Fee Stacking: Storage, fulfillment, returns, long-term inventory, the costs add up quickly especially for slow-moving or bulky items.

Loss of Brand Control: FBA often ships in Amazon-branded boxes unless you pay more. MCS offers non-branded plain packaging. But in both cases, you’ve lost the ability to include branded materials inside the package.

Channel Bias: Amazon prioritizes FBA (Amazon orders) during peak season over non-Amazon orders. They also limit the inventory they’ll stock based on their projected sales – which could be a problem if you have a promotion or unexpected spike in demand.

Unexpected Program Changes: Program changes with Amazon often happen quickly with limited notice. Walmart’s program is new and evolving. That creates an element of risk.

Still, Amazon and Walmart might be a reasonable choice, especially for fast-moving, smaller and lighter products. And if the products are already sold on Amazon or Walmart, filling orders from other channels might make sense. Be warned, however, that these options can be very expensive. We’ve seen clients where FBA fees added up to more than half of the product’s selling cost.

Use What You’ve Already Built

Etail created The Distribution Network (TDN) to address a simple reality: the choices most brands have to expand their D2C fulfillment are lousy:

Brand-owned warehouses and DCs are expensive to expand and often inefficient to operate until you gain D2C experience.
3PLs can be expensive, have long onboarding cycles, and demand experienced oversight.
FBA and other channel fulfillment programs are expensive, create the risk of unexpected changes, and don’t work well for many types of products.

And all these options require stockpiling additional inventory at multiple locations – which ties up working capital and drains inventory ROI.

The Distribution Network: a new way to fulfill D2C orders without starting from scratch.

The Network enables brands to leverage their regional distributors – who already have inventory in place – to fulfill ecommerce orders.

Multiple studies have shown that, depending on the product, three or four strategically placed fulfillment locations are enough to provide affordable 1-2 day delivery to most of the country.

So by partnering with a handful of regional distributors, brands can create a D2C fulfillment network working with partners they already know and trust. Plus brands can:

Avoid costly investments in warehouses, staff, or 3PLs.
Keep control over pricing, branding, and customer experience.
Align pricing with distributors to protect retailer and channel relationships.
Pay per order – turn fulfillment into a flexible, scalable cost.

The Distribution Network ecommerce platform connects sales channels, brands and their distributors. It automatically routes ecommerce orders to the stocking location with the lowest delivered cost. TDN also provides real-time inventory tracking and demand forecasting.

For distributors, TDN provides the tools to start fulfilling commerce orders with minimal impact on their current workflows. The goal? Get D2C fulfillment up and running without hassle or investment in additional systems.

Smarter D2C Fulfillment

Scaling D2C doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Many brands already have the inventory, the relationships, and the regional footprint they need. What’s been missing is the connective tissue – the technology to turn a network of distributors into a flexible, efficient fulfillment engine.

That’s the opportunity behind The Distribution Network.

It’s not about replacing your current partners. It’s about unlocking more value from them. It’s about building a D2C model that’s faster to launch, easier to manage, and better aligned with how your business already works.

You’ve already done the hard part – building a brand people want and a network that delivers it. Now there’s a smarter way to bring it all together.

You can learn more at distribution.network.

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