From Nightmare to 100,000+ Monthly Orders: How Tidalwave Scaled Their 3PL with ShipHero’s WMS

From Nightmare to 100,000+ Monthly Orders: How Tidalwave Scaled Their 3PL with ShipHero’s WMS

A $8M fulfillment business was hitting a wall. Manual bottlenecks, inventory blind spots, and a peak season that nearly broke them. Here is what changed.

Tidalwave Print & Fulfillment operates out of a 40,000-square-foot facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Specialized in screen printing, direct-to-garment printing, and custom engraving, Tidalwave is also a full-service 3PL, recently ranked in the top 1% of the INC 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America.

Getting there was not straightforward.

The Problem

Tidalwave was running its warehouse on ShipStation. It worked fine at smaller volumes. At scale, it fell apart.

The first crack was inventory visibility. "The main problem was we didn't have a great way of managing our inventory and knowing where things were," said Matt Schroeder, co-founder of Tidalwave. Without location-level tracking, picking was inefficient and the risk of overselling was constant.

The second crack was client communication. eCommerce clients make last-minute order changes, address updates, holds, and cancellations as a matter of routine. With no self-service portal, every single request had to go through Tidalwave's team manually. "That piled up day after day, where we couldn't ship orders until those things got done," Schroeder recalled. "It caused huge delays in our shipping, and it was kind of a nightmare situation."

The team was running an $8 million business through a tool that was never built for what they were trying to do.

The Decision

After Q4, Tidalwave made the call. "We realized that we need something different, and ShipHero was sort of top of mind of what we were going to switch to," said Schroeder.

They chose ShipHero because it was built specifically for high-volume eCommerce and 3PL fulfillment, not adapted from a simpler order management tool.

What Changed

• Inventory became visible and accurate. Real-time inventory management gave Tidalwave full visibility across their warehouse. Clients could see exactly what was on the shelf, and overselling stopped being a concern. Shopify integration kept data consistent across systems without manual reconciliation.
  
  
• Clients stopped calling for every change. ShipHero's client portal gave Tidalwave's customers the ability to manage their own orders, place holds, and make edits in real-time. The manual queue disappeared.
  
  
• Picking and packing got faster. Tidalwave implemented Multi-Item and Single-Item Batch Picking along with BulkShipping. A single packer at a ShipHero station can now process over 1,000 orders in a day.
  
  
• Onboarding new clients went from weeks to days. The interface is direct enough that new team members get up to speed quickly. New 3PL client onboarding, which previously took weeks, now takes one to two days.

The Results

"ShipHero provides every tool along the way to build out a system that allows you to scale and grow without the worry that you're going to outgrow your software."

Matt Schroeder, Co-Founder, Tidalwave Print & Fulfillment

Tidalwave now processes over 100,000 orders per month and continues to grow. The infrastructure they are running on is designed to handle the same level of control and accuracy at 1,000,000 orders per month as it does today.

FAQ

Was switching from ShipStation to ShipHero disruptive to daily operations?

The transition required onboarding and retraining, but the interface is built for warehouse teams, not software engineers. New staff get up to speed quickly, and the client onboarding process that used to take weeks now takes one to two days. The short-term adjustment is a fraction of the cost of staying on the wrong system.

Do Tidalwave's eCommerce clients need to use ShipHero themselves?

Yes, and that is part of what solved the bottleneck. ShipHero's client portal lets brand clients manage their own orders, make edits, and place holds without contacting Tidalwave's team. It removes a major source of operational drag for the 3PL.

Does ShipHero integrate with Shopify?

Yes. Tidalwave relies on the Shopify integration to keep inventory data accurate across their warehouse and their clients' storefronts. When inventory moves in the warehouse, it reflects in Shopify automatically.

What if Tidalwave keeps growing? Will they outgrow ShipHero?

Schroeder addressed this directly: ShipHero's infrastructure is built to scale from 10,000 to 1,000,000 orders per month without loss of control or accuracy. The system does not require a platform change at each growth milestone.

Is ShipHero only for large 3PLs?

No. ShipHero works for 3PLs at various stages of growth. What Tidalwave's story illustrates is what happens when a growing operation waits too long to make the switch. The right time to move to a purpose-built WMS is before peak season breaks you, not after.