With a handful of orders a day, logging into the carrier’s panel and creating shipments by hand is fine. As orders grow, it changes: copying tracking numbers to the site, notifying customers, printing labels and following up on returns eats up someone’s whole day. This post covers the decisions to make when setting up a shipping integration and the mistakes we see most often.
Direct carrier or shipping aggregator?
There are two ways. One is to sign your own agreement with a carrier and connect your site directly to its API. The other is to use a shipping aggregator that offers several carriers through one panel and one API.
A direct agreement strengthens your hand on pricing once your volume reaches a certain level, and there’s no extra intermediary. But every carrier’s API, label format and status codes are different, so adding a second carrier means a second integration.
An aggregator is practical, especially when you’re starting out: one connection gives you several carriers, and sometimes decent prices even at low volume. In return you add another dependency, and when something goes wrong there are two parties to deal with.
Which carriers or aggregators have ready plugins for your e-commerce platform also affects the decision.
What should the flow look like?
In the setups we build, the flow usually looks like this:
- The order’s payment is confirmed and it goes into preparation.
- When the order is marked ready to ship, a shipment is created at the carrier automatically.
- The label is generated and printed in the warehouse with one click.
- The tracking number is written to the order and sent to the customer by email or SMS.
- Shipping statuses (picked up, out for delivery, delivered) are fetched at intervals and recorded on the order.
Creating the shipment the moment the order arrives looks tempting but usually isn’t a good idea. If the order is cancelled or an item turns out to be out of stock, cancelling the shipment becomes extra work.
Volumetric weight (desi) errors
Shipping cost in Turkey is mostly based on desi, the package’s volume and weight. If product dimensions or weights are missing or wrong on your site, the integration creates shipments with the wrong desi. The month-end shipping invoice comes in higher than expected, or the carrier measures packages itself and charges the difference.
Carriers may also use different desi formulas. And for orders with several items in one box, adding up product desi values rarely reflects reality. Defining standard box sizes for common product combinations solves most of this.
Reviewing product dimensions before the integration matters as much as the integration itself.
Cash on delivery
If you offer cash on delivery, the amount to collect must be passed to the shipment correctly. When it goes wrong on orders with coupon discounts or partial payments, the courier asks the customer for the wrong amount, which is one of the most annoying errors there is. Also decide up front how the cash-on-delivery fee shows on the order.
Returns
Returns are often an afterthought. When a customer requests a return, gets a return code, hands the item to the carrier with that code, and the return is linked to the order automatically, the load on customer service drops a lot. Some carriers ask for a separate agreement or customer number for returns, so ask about this when you sign up.
More than one carrier
It can make sense to use one carrier for heavy, bulky items and another for small parcels, or a different carrier for certain regions. The integration can apply these rules automatically, as long as the rules are clear from the start and there’s a way to override them by hand for exceptions.
Think about invoicing at the same time
Shipping and e-archive invoicing usually meet at the same point: by the time the package is prepared, the invoice should already be issued and sent to the customer. We cover that side in our e-invoice and e-archive guide.
See which carriers we work with and how on our shipping and logistics integration page, or contact us.