How DSD works inside Spain — inbound to last-mile for parcels under 3 kg
DSD is our pick-pack-ship service for packages up to 3 kg. Here is the step-by-step of what happens from inbound to doorstep, and where accuracy actually matters.
On this page
DSD stands for Drop Shipping Distribution. It is the DDP Spain fulfillment service for light parcels — anything up to 3 kg going to a Spanish or EU address. This post walks through the operational flow, end to end, and flags the places where most fulfillment partners quietly lose your orders.
Inbound and put-away
Your supplier ships a pallet or case pack to our warehouse. Every incoming shipment is checked against the advance shipping notice: SKU, quantity, lot, expiry where relevant. Discrepancies are logged, photographed, and flagged the same day.
Put-away uses a bin-location system — each SKU has a home, and replenishment pulls from there. This sounds trivial until you have a run where SKU A and SKU B are visually similar, get mixed at put-away, and suddenly every order has a 3% chance of being wrong. We segregate lookalikes at the bin level to kill that risk.
Order capture
Orders flow in from your sales channel — Shopify, WooCommerce, a marketplace feed, or a custom webhook. Each order hits our WMS with a destination address, a shipping service (economy, express), and the SKU list. We treat the shipping service as the contract — if you sold express, we ship express.
Pick and pack accuracy — where most 3PLs fall down
Picking uses handheld scanners validating SKU and bin. If the scanner does not confirm the match, the pick does not happen. This is the difference between a 99% pick accuracy operation and a 99.9% one: the 99% operation trusts the picker to see the right SKU, and the 99.9% operation does not trust anyone.
Pack happens at a station with a weight check. If the packed parcel is more than 5% off the expected weight for that SKU mix, the station flags it for re-check before the label prints. That one control catches missing or extra units before they leave the building.
Carrier handoff and last-mile
Parcels under 3 kg ship through our integrated carriers — Correos, SEUR, GLS, depending on the destination and service level. Carrier handoff is tracked: when a parcel leaves our dock, the scan logs to your channel's status as "Shipped" automatically.
Inside Spain, typical delivery is 24 to 72 hours. Cross-border EU is two to five working days depending on destination and carrier.
When DSD makes sense
DSD is the right answer when your average parcel is under 3 kg, volume is steady (at least a few hundred parcels a week), and SLAs matter. If you are sending pallets to businesses, that is not DSD — that is our DDP cargo service, different economics.
Marketplace sellers, DTC brands with European customers, B2B consumables suppliers — these are the sweet spot.
SKU mapping gotchas
The single most common source of fulfillment errors is the SKU code mismatch between your sales channel and the WMS. Your Shopify product ID is not the same as your supplier's carton label is not the same as the WMS SKU. One of those three needs to be the master, and every translation between them needs to be explicit and tested.
During onboarding we map every SKU explicitly and run a sample batch before going live. Boring but it is the only way to avoid 2% of orders going to the wrong customer for the first month.