If Your 3PL Goes Bust, What Happens to Your Stock? 9 Checks Before You Sign in 2026

Your 3PL’s account manager stops answering the phone on Tuesday. By Thursday there’s a notice taped to the goods-in door, and a firm you’ve never heard of is running the building your stock lives in.

Your Shopify store is still taking orders. Nothing is leaving the building.

This isn’t a hypothetical. It happens regularly, and has happened in three high-profile cases in the last two years, to 3PL warehouses in Bristol, Nottingham and Paris.

Three warehouses, two years, and none of them were cowboys

Bristol. A venture-backed 3PL that had raised more than $150 million (call it £118 million). In May 2024 it had £50 million of annual recurring revenue, 700-plus staff and operations in five countries. By 23 December 2024 it was insolvent, having failed to make payroll. It was rescued by a pre-pack administration deal reportedly worth £9 in total: goodwill, IP, stock, IT equipment, customer contracts and business records, each sold for £1. Reports suggested the new owners did not take on the old company’s debts, and former customers went public accusing it of losing their stock. It’s trading again under new ownership. (BusinessCloud, April 2026)

Nottingham. A 3PL that referred to itself as the UK’s fastest-growing fulfilment service moved its entire operation into a new 80,000 sq ft site in October 2025, more than triple its previous capacity. Administrators were appointed five months later, on 6 March 2026. (Administration notice, March 2026)

Paris. An e-commerce fulfilment start-up backed by Bpifrance (the French state’s own investment bank), Eurazeo and 360 Capital, with a €35 million Series C in 2021 and a place on the government’s French Tech 120 list in 2022 and 2023. Receivership in July 2024. Liquidation on 27 September 2024, after what the French press described as a governance crisis. (Company record, Pappers)

Venture-backed, fastest-growing, state-backed. If it can happen to them, it can happen to your 3PL. Funding isn’t solvency. Growth isn’t solvency. Only solvency is solvency, and you can check it.

What actually happens to your stock when a 3PL goes into administration

The short version: it’s still yours. The long version is why you’ll want to make a cup of calming herbal tea.

• Someone else is in charge of the building. An administrator takes control of the company and its premises. Their legal duty is to the creditors, not to keeping your Black Friday campaign on track.
• Your goods aren’t their assets, but they can hold them. Standard UK warehouse conditions give the warehouse keeper a lien: the right to keep your goods until everything you owe is paid. If you were mid-way through a billing dispute the week they went under, your stock is now the collateral in that dispute.
• You have to prove it’s yours. Invoices, ASNs, the WMS stock reports. If the only record of what’s in the racking and the pick-bins is inside their WMS system, and their system’s been switched off, you’re blind and counting by hand, if they let you on premises.
• Collection is on you. Your transport, your labour, and their timetable, which will inevitably be slower than yours.
• The people who knew where things were may already have left. Notice periods in an insolvency are short.

None of that is unusual, or malicious. It’s the process, and the process doesn’t care that it’s Q4.

Then there’s the bit that catches out nearly everyone.

The £100 a tonne problem

Most UK 3PLs trade on the UK Warehousing Association’s Conditions of Contract, or on terms that borrow heavily from them. Condition 3 limits the warehouse keeper’s liability for loss or damage to £100 per tonne of goods by default, unless you’ve specified a higher limit in writing and paid the extra insurance premium. (UKWA Conditions, 2024 edition; UKWA’s own explainer) UKWA describes the Conditions as tested and proven in the High Court. Whatever the case law does next, £100 a tonne is the number until you’ve changed it in writing.

Do the maths on your own product. A tonne of £30 t-shirts at 200g apiece is about 5,000 shirts. Retail value: £150,000. Default liability if they’re lost: £100. Not per shirt. In total.

The same conditions say it in capitals on page one: the customer must insure the goods. The company does not insure the goods or underwrite their value. Most brands read that line for the first time after something has gone wrong.

Why almost nobody asks

Sit in enough 3PL discovery calls (we’ve sat in a lot) and you hear the same questions. Courier charges. Pick rate accuracy. Cut-off times. Does it integrate with Shopify. Do you do gift wrap.

You almost never hear “what happens to my stock if you go under?” Not because brands don’t care. Because it feels rude, and because there isn’t a slide for it in the sales deck.

There’s no polite way to ask it. Ask it anyway. Better still, don’t ask. Check.

9 checks to run before you sign a 3PL contract

Most of these take less than ten minutes and cost nothing. Together they’ll tell you more about a warehouse’s next twelve months than any tour. This isn’t the five things to have ready before you email a 3PL; that’s your side of the table. This is theirs.

1. Read their Companies House filings, not their website. Free, and quicker than the sales call. Are the accounts filed on time? Is the confirmation statement overdue? Any “material uncertainty” or going-concern wording in the notes? A cluster of director resignations in the last year? None of these is a verdict on its own. Two together is worth a conversation.
2. Look at the Charges tab. Same Companies House page, one click along. A registered debenture or floating charge tells you a lender has security over the whole business, and a floating-charge holder can appoint an administrator quickly and without a court hearing. That isn’t automatically bad; most funded businesses have one. But you want to know who holds it and when it was registered.
3. Run a credit check. Experian or Creditsafe will give you a score, a trend, any County Court Judgments, and how many days late they pay their own suppliers. A single report costs less than fifty quid. If they pay their carriers 45 days late, they’ll pay everyone 45 days late, right up until they don’t. (Every 3PL on the SHIPMAX panel goes through Experian before a brand hears its name. There’s no reason you can’t do the same.)
4. Ask which conditions they trade on, and what the liability cap is. UKWA, BIFA, their own? Get a copy. Find the cap. If it’s £100 a tonne and your stock is worth more than that (it is, of course it is), decide whether to raise the limit in writing under the 3PL’s policy and pay the premium, or cover it yourself under check 5.
5. Insure your own stock at their premises. Ask your broker for stock cover at third-party locations, sometimes called goods-in-trust or stock throughput cover. It’s usually cheap relative to the exposure. Then ask the 3PL for their warehouse keeper’s liability certificate, not to lean on, but to confirm they’ve insured the liability they do carry.
6. Understand the lien, and keep your account clean. If you owe them money on the day they fail, your stock is the security for it. Pay to terms. If you’re disputing an invoice, ring-fence the disputed amount and pay the rest, so the argument is never about all of it.
7. Ask about client concentration. “What percentage of your revenue is your biggest client?” If the answer is 40% and that client is quietly out to tender, their problem is about to be your problem. A good 3PL will tell you straight. An evasive answer is an answer to be wary of.
8. Walk the floor, at 10am on a weekday. Not the showroom tour. Look at the goods-in bay: is stock booked in, or stacked on the floor? What’s the ratio of agency lanyards to staff lanyards? Are the racks half-empty (lost clients) or dangerously full (can’t say no)? Does the WMS screen on the packing bench show today’s date? Twenty minutes on the floor tells you what the deck won’t. (It’s why every partner on our panel gets a visit before they’re admitted. Warehouses are hard to fake in person.)
9. Plan for their worst day, in the contract. Three clauses: goods remain your property at all times; you get a stock report you can export weekly, in a format you can open without their software; and on termination or insolvency, goods are released within a fixed number of days on payment of undisputed charges only. Then keep that weekly export somewhere that isn’t their system. If you’ve read how to switch 3PL without disrupting your customers, you’ll recognise most of this. A forced switch is the same process without the notice period.

Already with a 3PL? Do this week

• Pull a full stock export today and save it somewhere that’s yours.
• Read Condition 3 of your contract. Find the cap.
• Check your stock is insured at their address, not just at yours.
• Look at their Companies House filing history and Charges tab.
• Get your account to terms.

An hour, at most. It won’t stop a 3PL failing. It changes what that failure costs you from “potentially sinking your business” to “a stressful month”.

None of this is legal advice. Read your own contract, and if the numbers are big, pay a solicitor to read it too.

If you’d rather someone ran checks 1 to 9 before you ever sat on a call, that’s what the Lead Exchange by SHIPMAX does. Every 3PL on the panel is credit-checked on Experian, visited in person, and monitored before and after you sign with them. You get three matches to providers we rate, at 0% commission to brands.

Book a Call or email hello@shipmax.co.uk.

Not moving 3PL this year? Save this article for when you are.

Best, Phil

Founder, SHIPMAX LTD

Phil on LinkedIn