Will C.
Would not wish this experience on anyone. What they put us through could have put some others out of business. Consider working with them at your own peril.
In our opinion, choosing Rocket Shippers as a 3PL provider back in 2022 was the worst decision we ever made in all our years in business. In Q2 2022, we moved our east coast fulfillment operations to their KY facility, and shortly after our west coast operations to their new Las Vegas facility. In our opinion, it was a huge mistake. Onboarding was a fiasco, and from our perspective Rocket Shippers made a number of mistakes including receiving our goods from our previous warehouse, and NOT scanning them properly before starting to fulfill orders. They tried to paper the cracks until weeks later when they could no longer fulfill orders in reasonable time and a backlog of orders quickly built up. We halted accepting orders but it was already too late – weeks turned into months and it cost us a tremendous amount of time, effort, resources, and reputational damage just to untangle that mess. In the next few months (i.e. from the beginning of 2023 to August 2023), things occasionally ran smoothly for a few weeks here and there, but in our opinion, there were often challenges that went beyond what we had experienced with other 3PLs, such as: • They would often tell us what we wanted to hear but either failed to meet promised deadlines or would go MIA. We were constantly putting out fires with customers getting angry with our service level; • Inaccurate inventory management and lack of reliable reporting; • Frequent personnel change and way too much politics. We were not interested in their internal politics but it became our problem when they had mid-managers going through power fights and one even went on record to tell the pick workers to not work on our orders; and • Utter lack of reliability. It seemed to us, in hindsight, that whenever they signed on new business, our regular order fulfillment would slow down or get disrupted. The problems continued. Starting in mid-August, from our perspective, they started to fall behind in order fulfillment at their Las Vegas warehouse. We were told the facility manager and his deputy were all let go. Weeks of order backlog quickly built up and we started to escalate. In mid-September, we were told that the CEO’s dad would like to have a meeting. What happened next caught us by complete surprise – he looked at our product assortment and determined that he didn’t like us as a client, and he was kicking us out with 30 days’ notice. In our opinion, how they handled things during that period was unprofessional and unethical. They said they would fulfill the overdue orders but nothing was shipped out for weeks. We had tens of thousands of dollars of orders canceled and suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost sales as our inventory in both warehouses became unavailable for normal fulfillment. We felt helpless. We even sent our own team members to the Vegas facility to get many long overdue orders out the door with permission from the warehouse manager (and they were kicked out by the CEO’s dad on the last day when he found out and was somehow offended). While we had to deal with so many customers angry with their delayed orders, we also had to scramble and find a new partner in a ridiculously short amount of time, right before the holiday season. In the meantime, their CEO, who only in May/June was telling us how much he valued our partnership, was on a long honeymoon and went MIA. By luck we were able to find an alternative 3PL and we moved our stock out of their Las Vegas facility quickly. However, we had more difficulty moving our goods out of the Kentucky facility. In our opinion, Rocket Shippers effectively held our products hostage while asking for money repeatedly. Each week they would pack up a few dozen pallets, send us a bill of a few thousand dollars, and demand that we pay before they let our trucks come for pickup. From our perspective, it felt like a classic ransom situation, and we were forced to pay more than six times the amount we paid for exiting the Las Vegas facility, even though there were significantly less goods in KY. It felt completely wrong. We concluded that we desperately needed our goods for the survival of our business, so under what was, from our perspective, duress, we felt that we had no choice but to pay their demands to get our goods. It did significant harm to our business. After we got our products back we raised our concerns that in our opinion the move-out charges were unreasonable and the practice of holding our goods was unethical, but Rocket Shippers refused to try and make things right. I would not wish this experience on anyone. What they put us through could have put some others out of business. Consider working with them at your own peril.