Ecommerce Shipping API and Integration Solution

November 20, 2024

by Jaidyn Farar

Let’s face it: ecommerce logistics is complicated. Managing inventory, staying in touch with suppliers, vetting new shipping carriers, ordering packaging supplies, and fielding customer concerns—all of these tasks have the potential to consume too much time and money.

That’s why technology is so essential. With the right tools, your business will operate more efficiently, avoid shipping slow-downs, and keep your customers happy.

If you’re looking for ways to make your logistics more efficient, a shipping API is a vital part of your ecommerce tech stack. But what exactly is a shipping API, and what can it do for your business?

What is a shipping API?

A shipping API is a software interface that connects ecommerce platforms with shipping carriers to automate tasks like label generation, tracking, and rate calculations. The API works as a bridge between your website and a carrier’s platform, allowing data to travel between them.

While carriers like USPS, UPS, and FedEx often have their own APIs, many technology providers—including EasyPost—offer multi-carrier shipping APIs that allow merchants to connect with dozens of carriers using a single integration (more on that later).

Why do I need a shipping API?

Customers have high expectations when it comes to online shopping. They want their products to be delivered quickly (often within just a few days) without paying a premium for shipping. By automating manual shipping processes, businesses can better meet these high consumer expectations, providing faster delivery times and lower costs.

That’s the big-picture view of why your business needs a shipping API, but we can get more specific. You might need a shipping API for ecommerce if you want to automate the following tasks and capabilities:

Shipping label creation

One of the most important functions of a shipping API is automatic shipping label generation, which allows businesses to quickly produce accurate, carrier-compliant labels when customers place online orders. Without the need for manual input, the chances of human error are reduced and order fulfillment can be completed more quickly.

Multi-carrier support

You’re likely familiar with the difficulties of choosing which shipping carrier(s) to partner with. Because carrier prices vary based on package size and weight, destination, delivery time, and other factors, it can be hard to know which will give you the best deal for each package you ship.

Multi-carrier shipping APIs solve this problem! They integrate with multiple carriers, giving you access to a range of delivery options. This allows you to automatically choose the best carrier for each order, optimizing for cost, speed, and reliability.

In addition to the money you’ll save by optimizing your shipping, multi-carrier APIs offer significant rate discounts. For example, businesses that use EasyPost save up to 83% when shipping with carriers like USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, and more.

Address verification

An address verification feature checks and corrects customer addresses, ensuring that orders are sent to valid, accurate destinations. This reduces delivery errors, failed shipments, and additional costs from returned packages.

Real-time tracking

For today’s customers, package tracking isn’t a nice-to-have feature; it’s a requirement.

A shipping API provides access to real-time tracking, allowing businesses and customers alike to follow a package’s journey from dispatch to delivery. By keeping customers informed about their package’s status, you’ll build trust and be able to resolve shipping issues more quickly.

Rate and transit time calculation

A shipping API can automatically calculate shipping rates and estimated transit times based on factors like package dimensions, weight, and destination. This lets online merchants offer accurate pricing to customers and helps customers make informed choices about shipping options.

Insurance

If you’re considering offering shipping insurance, a shipping API will make the process simple. Through the API, you can automatically select insurance coverage at the time of shipping, customizing it based on factors like package value or destination.

The power of integration: How shipping APIs work

Before diving into how shipping APIs work, let’s take a quick step back. What exactly is an API? Simply put, an API (application programming interface) allows two software systems to communicate with each other. It follows rules that let one application make requests to another application to perform actions like creating, reading, updating, or deleting data.

A shipping API allows your ecommerce platform to communicate with shipping carrier software to calculate rates and transit times, create labels, track packages, and more.

For example, consider the process of creating shipping labels. Without an API, creating labels might require you to collect customer order details, go to a carrier’s website, upload all the data, and choose your preferred shipping methods. If you instead rely on an API, that order data can be used to automatically generate shipping labels for the carrier and service of your choice. No manual work necessary!

The best shipping APIs work hand-in-hand with your warehouse management system (WMS) and order management system (OMS) to make the order fulfillment process smooth from start to finish.

The benefits of using a shipping API for ecommerce

If you’ve read this far, you understand just how powerful a shipping API can be for an ecommerce business. This section will give a quick recap of the most important benefits.

Streamlined processes. By reducing manual labor, a shipping API minimizes errors (such as incorrect addresses) and helps you get shipments out on the road faster.
Cost savings. By providing real-time rate comparisons and bulk shipping discounts, a shipping API lowers costs. For example, Sticker Mule was able to save over $6,000 per month using EasyPost’s SmartRate API.
Scalability. As your business grows, your shipping API should easily adapt to handle larger volumes, accommodating additional carriers, locations, and order volumes without requiring significant new infrastructure or personnel.

Making integration easy: How to get started

Getting started with a shipping API is simple! Just research and select an API, work with the provider’s team to complete integration, and continue to optimize.

Step 1: Pick your API

Some businesses choose to integrate with carriers individually, which can create major headaches for their development teams. We recommend going with a multi-carrier shipping API, which lets you connect with national, regional, and local carriers using a single integration.

As you research and evaluate different solutions, consider the following factors:

Speed. Look for a solution that offers fast response times, especially during high-traffic periods.
Customization. A flexible API can adapt as your business grows, making it easier to meet changing customer demands.
Compatibility. Make sure the API will work well with the other systems in your logistics tech stack, including your ecommerce platform, WMS, and OMS.
Cost. It’s important to understand both upfront fees and any usage-based charges before getting started with a shipping API.
Customer support. When technical difficulties occasionally arise, you’ll benefit from using an API with accessible, responsive customer support.
Reliability. A reliable API performs consistently, without unexpected downtime or errors. Businesses should look for established API providers with high uptime to avoid disruptions.
Security. Choose a solution with robust encryption and data protection protocols to safeguard against breaches.

Step 2: Integrate

After you choose an API, it’s time to complete your ecommerce shipping integration. During this stage, your in-house development team will use the API provider’s documentation (see an example here) to connect your business's ecommerce platform or warehouse management system with the API. They’ll configure it to pull order details and automatically choose from various shipping carriers based on a customer’s location, delivery speed, and cost preferences. Generally, the API provider can provide support via phone or email communication.

Step 3: Test, optimize, and succeed

Before going live, your team will conduct some tests to make sure the API accurately generates shipping labels, calculates rates, and updates tracking information. Once everything works smoothly, the integration will go live! From then on, the API will simply run in the background, streamlining multi-carrier shipping options and making your life easier.

Frequently asked questions include …

How long does it take to integrate a shipping API? Integrating with a new technology provider can take anywhere from a few days to several months, depending on the complexity of your operations. Fortunately, once you’ve completed the integration process with a mutli-carrier API, adding new carriers is fast and easy.

How do I know if my integration is successful? You can know if your integration is successful by monitoring your shipping time, shipping costs, and order fulfillment accuracy.

The future of ecommerce shipping

Ecommerce shipping is complicated, and high customer expectations only add to the challenges. As your business grows, you need a reliable solution to speed up shipping, reduce errors, and keep costs low. With our suite of shipping APIs, EasyPost provides tools for any shipping need your business might have:

With a library of dozens of carriers and steep rate discounts, EasyPost helps SMBs and large enterprises alike save time and money on shipping.

Talk to a logistics expert about the EasyPost Shipping API.