B2B Fulfillment SLA

When retailers set the rules, your SLA becomes your margin

B2B fulfillment sounds like shipping pallets instead of parcels. In practice, it is a rulebook with penalties. Retailers set deadlines, label requirements, routing guides, and EDI timelines, then they enforce those rules with chargebacks and cancellations. If your B2B fulfillment SLA is vague, your margins will not be. The fines will find you, and they will arrive with the confidence of an invoice.

This is why brands that grow into retail suddenly start searching for B2B fulfillment SLA guidance. They are not trying to become logistics experts for fun. They are trying to stop bleeding money in ways that do not show up on a Shopify dashboard. The right SLA definition turns compliance from an occasional scramble into a measurable operating system.

What a B2B fulfillment SLA actually covers

A B2B SLA is not only about outbound speed. It covers receiving, outbound processing, plus the B2B specific work that retailers require. Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described the scope plainly: "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." That matters because a retailer order can fail on time even when outbound is fast if inbound inventory was not received and stowed quickly enough to be pickable.

Receiving SLAs define how quickly inventory becomes available to ship. Outbound SLAs define how quickly orders move through pick, pack, and staging. B2B SLAs define whether the shipment is compliant: correct labels, correct routing, correct paperwork, and correct data transmission. If any piece breaks, the retailer can still fine you even if the product arrives.

Why B2B is different from D2C in the ways that hurt

D2C rewards speed and accuracy, and the punishment is often unhappy customers. B2B adds formal penalties. In D2C, a late shipment can lead to a complaint. In B2B, a late shipment can lead to an automatic chargeback, or an order cancellation that wipes out planned revenue. The rules are stricter, and the tolerance for exceptions is smaller.

Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10 Fulfillment, described the hard edge of retailer deadlines. "Target has a deadline for delivery and that's it, no exceptions. They'll just cancel the order." When a retailer can cancel, your problem is not only the shipment. Your problem is the relationship, the forecast, and the inventory you now have to re-route.

Why compliance is part of the SLA, not a separate checkbox

Many brands treat compliance as paperwork. Retailers treat it as a requirement for accepting product into their network. If your labels are wrong, or your ASN is late, or your routing guide is ignored, the retailer can fine you even if the boxes are perfect.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, explained why B2B must be built into the system from day one. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He described what retailers demand and why those demands need to be tracked as part of fulfillment performance. "They have routing guides that make you specific labels on and put them in a specific place on the box, and you have to send EDI, ASN, electronic information in a timely fashion." That sentence is the heart of a B2B fulfillment SLA: physical compliance plus electronic compliance, both on time.

What to measure to know if your B2B SLA is holding

A B2B SLA should be measurable at the milestone level. You want to know whether receiving is keeping inventory available on time, whether outbound is processing orders within the agreed window, whether labels and routing are correct, and whether EDI or ASN events were sent on time. If you cannot measure these milestones, you cannot prevent chargebacks, because you cannot see risk early.

Shipping speed still matters, but it must be measured honestly. Many systems mark an order complete before the carrier has it. Customers can tolerate some ambiguity. Retailers typically cannot. Joel Malmquist explained why he avoids using shipped as a catch-all word. "The reason I don't say ship is because sometimes it will be marked as completed, but the carrier doesn't actually pick it up right away, but the tracking goes back to Shopify." For B2B, the handoff milestone matters because routing windows and pickup schedules can be part of the compliance chain.

Receiving SLAs are the quiet make-or-break factor in B2B

Retail orders often involve longer lead times and larger quantities, which can tempt teams to treat receiving as routine. In reality, receiving delays can cascade into missed ship windows. If inbound inventory is on the dock but not counted and stowed, it is not truly available to ship, and your outbound team ends up trying to hit retailer deadlines without product that is technically in the building.

Malmquist described receiving SLAs in a way that maps directly to what you should measure. "For receiving, the SLA is covers the time from the moment that we get a container on the dock with inventory in it, and how much time we have to count that in, and stow it away into the locations that we're going to pick from." When this clock is tracked and visible, you can plan labor and priorities around retailer windows instead of discovering too late that inventory is still sitting unprocessed.

Why accuracy must be reported at unit level for B2B

B2B orders can involve large unit counts, multi-SKU assortments, and strict carton or pallet rules. An error rate that looks tiny at the order level can be huge at the unit level. That is why B2B SLA measurement should include unit-level accuracy and compliance correctness, not only a simple pass or fail by PO.

Malmquist described accuracy at a unit level in a way that shows why it matters. "We have over 99.9% ship accuracy of these orders, which when you look at it on a unit level, such as unit shift versus unit errors, I almost couldn't believe it when I came here, how well we're doing on B2B shipping." That is not a marketing line. It is a reminder that B2B accuracy is measurable and that it has to be measured in a way that matches how retailers audit shipments.

Why scan events are the foundation of defensible compliance

When a retailer issues a chargeback, your best defense is clean proof. Proof is not a meeting and not a feeling. It is a trail of events that shows what was picked, how it was packed, what labels were applied, and when the electronic documents were transmitted. That kind of proof starts with scan events.

Wright described what a strong WMS does at a fundamental level. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He explained why that traceability matters operationally. "At any point in time, I know that Bobby has this product on fork 10 right now, and if I needed to go find that product, I just got to go find Bobby on fork 10." In B2B, that traceability is not only helpful, it is protective. It lets you investigate quickly, correct quickly, and respond to disputes with data instead of guesses.

How retailer deadlines turn good days into compressed timelines

Retail orders often arrive with fixed delivery dates, and when inbound timing is imperfect, the timeline can compress brutally. This is where the SLA needs to be more than words. It needs to be a plan for how work is prioritized and how exceptions are handled.

Woods described what compressed timelines can look like in practice. "When it came in, it had to be completed, received, shipped, labeled, ready for routing to a carrier by that next morning." In that scenario, every hour matters. A B2B SLA that tracks milestones in real time helps you identify where to apply labor, where to escalate, and where to communicate, because waiting for a weekly report would be like checking the weather after the storm.

Why visibility reduces chargebacks by reducing surprise

B2B SLAs are easier to meet when brands and 3PL teams can see risk early. Visibility is not only a convenience. It is how you prevent misses before they become penalties. Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described what real-time portals provide. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She also described the practical value of that visibility. "They can actually watch those progressions going on."

Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described what customers should expect to see in that visibility. "Our clients get best-in-class visibility and transparency. They can see their daily orders, they can see KPIs, and they can see historical transactions." In B2B, that matters because you need to know not only whether a PO shipped, but whether it shipped compliant, with the right electronic events sent on time.

Where G10 fits if your B2B SLA needs to survive scrutiny

If you are expanding into retail, or you are already feeling the pain of chargebacks, a B2B fulfillment SLA has to be measurable, enforceable, and backed by real tracking. G10 focuses on B2B-first system design, scan-based execution, and customer-facing visibility so you can see milestones, catch risks, and prove compliance. As Wright said, "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." That foundation supports the kind of compliance detail retailers require.

If you want to see whether a fulfillment provider can support your retail growth, ask for a walkthrough of a live B2B day, including one PO with routing guide requirements and one exception case. You should be able to trace labels, compliance milestones, and EDI timing end-to-end, so you can spend less time paying penalties and more time selling through.