Demand-driven fulfillment

When Your Warehouse Keeps Guessing Wrong

Every ecommerce brand eventually discovers that the warehouse is excellent at moving products but terrible at reading minds. Orders spike without warning, certain SKUs vanish overnight, and other products sit untouched like wallflowers at a bad school dance. When your operation is constantly chasing demand instead of anticipating it, you are not running a fulfillment strategy. You are running a very loud, very expensive game of whack-a-mole. Demand-driven fulfillment exists to break that cycle by aligning your operations with what customers actually want instead of what you hope they want.

Search interest around demand-driven methods has grown because brands are tired of being blindsided. Between volatile carrier performance, shifting supply chains, and the rise of social-based buying surges, inventory needs have become faster and stranger than traditional models were built to handle. Demand-driven fulfillment introduces structure into the chaos by letting data lead instead of gut instinct.

The Problem With Forecasting in a Vacuum

Most brands attempt forecasting with a familiar toolkit: spreadsheets, last year’s holiday trends, and an optimistic guess or two. That toolbox collapses quickly when demand shifts based on influencer mentions, unexpected media attention, or retail partners who change timelines without warning. Forecasts lose credibility, replenishments land at the wrong times, and your warehouse becomes a gallery of predictable surprises.

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10, hears the same complaints from brands moving away from rigid or outdated fulfillment setups. She explains that "most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and meeting the committed requirements." Demand-driven fulfillment requires those pillars. Without them, forecasts remain fiction.

Why Fulfillment Must React at the Speed of Customers

Demand-driven operations rely on real-time signals: order velocity, SKU combinations, channel-specific surges, and marketplace trends. If your systems update once a day or if workers handle products without scanning them, you are already behind. Static workflows cannot respond to moving targets.

Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10, gets right to the point. "You want everything to be scanned in the warehouse, nothing done on paper." Scanning converts movement into data. Data fuels demand-driven decision-making. When every product touch is a tracked event, your fulfillment engine becomes a live dashboard instead of a rearview mirror.

From Push to Pull: Letting Customers Dictate Movement

Traditional fulfillment pushes inventory into storage based on broad assumptions about demand. Demand-driven fulfillment flips that logic. Instead of preparing for theoretical needs, it responds to actual purchasing patterns. A sudden spike in a specific SKU does not trigger panic. It triggers an automatic reallocation of labor, slotting, and inbound plans.

Because G10’s network spans South Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, ChannelPoint can reroute orders, rebalance workloads, and shift inventory visibility on the fly so operations behave like a coordinated system rather than rigid silos.

Slotting That Evolves With Demand

Demand-driven fulfillment changes the physical flow of the warehouse. SKUs with rising velocity move closer to pack stations. Low performers shift outward. Seasonal kits gain temporary prime locations. The warehouse breathes with demand instead of forcing workers to travel past irrelevant inventory to reach hot sellers.

Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10, explains how preparation powers adaptability. "We start planning peak times months ahead of time. We run forecast models, staffing models, and we audit inventory." Those audits reveal when slotting must change, not as a reaction to mistakes but as part of a strategic rhythm.

Demand Signals Across DTC, Marketplace, and B2B Channels

Modern brands do not operate in a single lane. A product may surge on Shopify one week, spike on Amazon the next, and suddenly appear in a retail PO the week after. Demand-driven fulfillment acknowledges that demand is multi-channel, not linear.

Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10, highlights the unified backbone that makes this possible. He says that orders flow through "direct integration with Shopify where orders come in and flow directly into G10" and that the same system supports "B2B shipping into places like Target and Walmart." When every channel shares the same operational core, one surge does not sabotage the others.

Labor Allocation That Moves With Demand

Demand-driven fulfillment is not just about inventory. It is about people. During volume surges, the warehouse needs labor in different places: more pickers on certain aisles, more packers for specific SKUs, more receiving staff for inbound replenishments. Static labor plans break under dynamic conditions.

Automation supports these pivots. Zebra autonomous robots inside G10 facilities reduce the physical burden on workers by shrinking travel paths and maintaining flow. Holly notes that the robots "are allowing efficiency with pick paths. They are lowering fatigue on employees." That endurance is crucial during unpredictable spikes.

Inbound Planning for Real Demand Instead of Rough Timelines

Demand-driven fulfillment connects the dots between outbound behavior and inbound scheduling. Instead of placing purchase orders based on monthly or quarterly intervals, brands adjust replenishment to match real consumption. Seasonal spikes receive expedited inbound plans. Slow movers receive smaller, more controlled restocks. Kits and bundles receive timed assembly cycles.

Beyond inbound velocity, demand patterns also influence how receiving is staged. If a replenishment for a fast-moving SKU arrives, ChannelPoint prioritizes unloading and slotting so those units become available quickly instead of sitting idle in receiving queues.

Preventing Stockouts Without Building a Warehouse of Safety Stock

Old-fashioned fulfillment solves stockouts by ordering more inventory than you need. Demand-driven fulfillment solves stockouts by understanding why products experience spikes. Safety stock becomes strategic instead of bloated. Brands avoid the temptation to fill the warehouse with inventory that may never move.

G10’s real-time visibility tools help brands see when demand spikes are anomalies or sustained trends. Connor emphasizes this visibility, noting that clients "can see their daily orders, they can see KPIs, and they can see historical transactions." Demand becomes something you manage, not something that surprises you.

Returns as a Source of Demand Intelligence

Returns provide some of the most useful demand data. High returns for certain SKUs may reflect product issues, poor listings, or packaging failures. Demand-driven fulfillment incorporates return behavior into forecasting so the network does not reorder SKUs that disappoint customers or generate waste.

Joel describes how returns are classified with precision. "It looks good, we are going to restock this, or it looks damaged, we are going to either dispose of it or put it in a quarantine area." Clean classification prevents false demand signals.

Demand-Driven Fulfillment as a Competitive Advantage

The brands that master demand-driven fulfillment are the brands that scale smoothly. Their inventory moves at the right pace. Their customers experience consistent service. Their cash flow improves because products do not sit idle. Their warehouse stays agile instead of brittle.

Mark Becker, CEO and founder of G10, states the long-term vision clearly: "we are going to grow with them." Demand-driven fulfillment is one of the most reliable ways to create that growth without drowning the operation in excess cost or complexity.

Making Demand Work for You Instead of Against You

If your current operation feels like a cycle of stockouts, overstocks, last-minute transfers, or panicked forecasts, it may be time to rethink how your warehouse reacts to the signals your customers are already sending. Demand-driven fulfillment turns those signals into strategy. With the right visibility and a fulfillment partner who treats data as infrastructure, your operation becomes smarter every day.

When you are ready to build a fulfillment approach that grows with your brand instead of fighting it, G10 can help you turn customer demand into an asset instead of an emergency.