Same-Day Shipping SLA

When "ships today" becomes a promise you must keep

Same-day shipping is one of those ideas that sounds simple until you try to run it. Marketing wants it because it lifts conversion. Customer support wants it because it cuts down on "where is my order" emails. Retail partners want it because their deadlines are fixed and their patience is not. The warehouse wants it, too, but the warehouse wants it defined, measured, and resourced, because a vague promise turns into a daily scramble.

That is why a same-day shipping SLA matters. It is the rulebook for what qualifies, what the cutoff is, what "shipped" means, and what happens when the day gets weird. Without that rulebook, the brand thinks it is offering same-day, the customer thinks the box is already moving, and the 3PL thinks a label print is close enough. Those three stories do not end well.

What a same-day shipping SLA actually covers

Most people hear SLA and think outbound only. In reality, a same-day shipping promise sits on top of multiple service levels across the building. 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." If inbound inventory is late to receive and stow, same-day outbound can fail even when pick and pack are working hard.

Malmquist also defined the practical cutoff logic that turns a marketing claim into an operational clock. "For D2C, which is an order through Shopify or on the merchant's website, if it's before noon, we're going to ship that order the same day." That is the heart of a same-day shipping SLA: a clear deadline, a clear expectation, and a clear measurement.

Why the word "shipped" causes more fights than it should

Same-day SLAs collapse when everyone uses a different definition of shipped. Some systems treat shipped as order completed. Customers treat shipped as carrier acceptance. Retailers treat shipped as compliance plus routing plus EDI, because that is what keeps their DCs flowing. If you do not separate those definitions, you can hit your internal SLA and still disappoint customers.

Malmquist explained the gap with a detail that matters more than most people realize. "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." A mature same-day SLA measures both milestones: warehouse completion and carrier acceptance, because customers experience the second one.

Same-day shipping is a capacity problem disguised as a speed problem

Most late shipments are not caused by one slow person. They are caused by flow. A wave of orders arrives, a pick path backs up, pack stations choke, or the dock gets jammed at the exact moment the carrier cutoff is approaching. Same-day shipping exposes those weak points quickly because it leaves very little room for recovery later.

That is also why brands come looking for a 3PL after being burned elsewhere. Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described the pattern he hears from merchants trying to compete on speed. "I hear nowadays a lot of people want to offer you know same-day fulfillment for customers who place orders before specific times, which is something we do." He also described the experience that drives people to switch. "But then I hear a customer say, 'A previous 3PL took three days from when the order was placed to when they would ship it.'" Same-day SLAs force the operation to reveal whether speed is real or just wishful thinking.

Receiving discipline is the quiet enabler of same-day promises

Same-day shipping feels like an outbound topic, but inbound can ruin it. If inventory arrives and sits unreceived, the WMS might not show it as available, and the warehouse might not be allowed to pick it. That creates preventable backorders, split shipments, and a scramble to locate product that is technically in the building but not pickable.

Malmquist defined receiving SLA timing in clock terms that match how a warehouse actually works. "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." A same-day shipping SLA that ignores receiving is like a race plan that ignores whether the shoes are on.

Retail deadlines raise the stakes beyond D2C expectations

Same-day for D2C is often about customer delight and conversion. Same-day for B2B can be about survival, because big-box retailers enforce deadlines with cancellations and chargebacks. That is why the SLA needs to be segmented by channel, and why the operation needs the ability to pivot when the retailer changes the plan.

Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10 Fulfillment, described how rigid the rules can be. "Target has a deadline for delivery and that's it, no exceptions. They'll just cancel the order." She described what happens when inventory arrives late but the deadline stays fixed. "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, same-day is not a marketing boast. It is a sprint to protect revenue.

The KPIs that keep a same-day SLA honest

If you only measure on-time shipping at the end of the day, you will miss the leading indicators that show you are about to fail. A same-day SLA needs a small set of KPIs that track flow: order release timing, pick cycle time, pack cycle time, and ready-to-ship staging time. It also needs carrier handoff timing, because a completed order that misses pickup is a same-day miss in the eyes of the customer.

Woods described how serious same-day performance can be when the metric is treated as a hard requirement. "We currently can boast a 99.9% on time fulfillment rate." That level of performance is not an accident. It comes from measuring the steps that produce the outcome, then staffing and tooling those steps so the SLA is achievable without daily heroics.

How same-day SLAs survive peak days and surprise spikes

Same-day shipping is easy to sell on a calm week. It is harder when volume doubles, inbound arrives late, and carriers tighten pickup windows. The best defense is planning, forecasting, and the ability to flex labor and process quickly. When those pieces are missing, a single bad day can turn into a week of backlog.

Woods described how G10 plans peaks months ahead, not days ahead. "We start planning peak times, such as the holiday season, months ahead of time." She also described what that planning looks like in concrete terms. "We run forecast models, staffing models, and we audit inventory, equipment." Planning does not remove surprises, but it keeps surprises from becoming disasters.

What it takes to hit same-day when the clock is unforgiving

Sometimes you can do everything right and still face a deadline that is about to be missed. In those moments, the difference is not a clever dashboard. The difference is decision-making and urgency. John Pistone, Chief Revenue Officer at G10 Fulfillment, described a real-world example where the team protected the same-day metric under pressure. "Over thye most recent Prime Day we hit 100% shipped on time for same-day shipping." He then described the tactic that made the metric true, not theoretical. "We started getting behind in one of our warehouses at 8 p.m., so we sent somebody from the team with a flatbed, threw pallets on that flatbed, and drove it to the FedEx hub so that they could receive it that day."

That story is not an instruction to run your operation on adrenaline. It is a reminder that a same-day SLA is a real promise with a real clock, and sometimes the only way to keep it is to treat the cutoff like the cutoff. When the operation measures carrier acceptance and not just warehouse completion, it can make the right call early enough to matter.

Visibility is how you manage same-day, not how you apologize for missing it

Brands do not just want good performance. They want to see it. When a merchant can watch order status move through stages, they can answer customers faster and spot risks before the day is lost. Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described what real-time visibility changes for customers. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She explained the practical value in a simple line. "They can actually watch those progressions going on."

Perkins described the same visibility from the reporting side. "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." A same-day SLA is easier to keep when the business can see the work moving, because it reduces guesswork and accelerates problem-solving.

Where G10 fits if same-day shipping is a competitive requirement

If you want to offer a same-day shipping SLA, you need more than fast picking. You need clear cutoffs, scan-based execution, carrier handoff measurement, and the ability to flex when retailers or customers change the day on you. G10 focuses on visibility, operational discipline, and a WMS foundation designed to measure work as it happens, so same-day is a managed promise instead of a daily gamble.

If you want to see whether a same-day SLA is realistic for your order profile, your SKU mix, and your carrier setup, ask for a walkthrough of a live day in the portal, including how orders are measured from order release through carrier acceptance. You should be able to trace one order end-to-end, see the cutoff logic, and understand what happens during spikes, so you can grow faster without turning shipping into your biggest risk.