3PL.

A contractor that holds someone else's finished inventory and picks, packs and ships it against incoming orders, billing per receipt, per pallet per month, per pick and per parcel. A POD factory does none of that. It holds undecorated blanks, prints to the order, and the finished item never enters stock, so there is no put-away, no pick face and no cycle count. The line falls where an item exists before the order does: pre-printed runs, folded and bagged merch, kitted bundles of a shirt with a sticker pack and a card are 3PL work, while a one-off DTG shirt is not. Most shops find the boundary the hard way, when a bundle order splits across two origins with two tracking numbers and support cannot say where the other half is.