We shipped a feature most people would call basic.
"Isn't that standard?"
No — not if you're a small brand running through a 3PL.
What it's about
If your brand sells food, supplements, or cosmetics, shelf life is non-negotiable. A product expiring in three weeks isn't something you want to sell at full price. You want to discount it, stop running ads on that specific SKU, or in some cases donate it before it's too late.
But you can only make those calls if you know which stock expires when. And here's the catch: most smaller brands that outsource fulfillment do not see that information in their own dashboard.
They see total stock. They see per-SKU counts. They see what's selling. But the shelf life per batch? That lives somewhere inside the fulfiller's system — often behind an email request or a separate portal.
What we built
We now pull shelf-life dates per SKU and per batch from our fulfiller into the WeUniteBrands platform. In the brand dashboard, you see exactly which batches are close to expiring, with a clear categorization: critical, warning, plenty of time.
Filter for products expiring within 30, 60, or 90 days. Export for your marketing team. Connect it to a discount campaign in our own platform.
It looks small. It's one screen. But the gap between assuming your stock is fine and seeing that your stock is fine is enormous.
Why this didn't exist
The big brands already have it. Enterprise WMS systems pull batch data through by default. But for smaller brands that are just below the threshold for their own WMS, the data sits locked inside the fulfiller's system. Nobody had bothered to bridge it — for the fulfiller it's not a differentiator, and for the brand it's too much bespoke work.
We sit in between. That made it a logical thing for us to build.
The broader lesson
Good software solves problems your customers didn't know existed — until they run into them. And then the reaction is: "wait, wasn't that already in there?"
Now it is.