What is the use of third-party shipping & tracking APIs?
Third-party shipping and tracking API service providers can help companies such as online sellers and 3PLs solve multiple courier API integrations and provide value-added services.
Most people's understanding of third-party shipping & tracking APIs stays in these two aspects, except for these services. What value can the business provide? This article aims to help you fully understand the importance of third-party shipping & tracking service providers, and I hope it will be helpful to you.
Since the couriers open their API documentation to all companies, why do companies pay for the shipping API integration services?
Businesses can directly integrate the couriers' tracking and shipping APIs, but they will encounter some problems.
1- It takes a lot of time to integrate the API of the couriers directly. It takes at least one week to get permission and API key to use the API of the couriers, and sometimes several weeks. The reason is that couriers' real business is shipping, not providing API services.
2- The data transmission speed of the API of the couriers is slow. If the tracking query is large, the scaling issue will be challenging to solve.
3- If the company needs to use the services of multiple couriers (many companies do), the company will need to repeatedly deal with the above problems.
4- If companies directly access the courier API services, they can independently eliminate every failure point in the API integration process. However, this also means that whenever the courier company's API fails, the company that uses the API is the one who directly handles these problems.
5- The couriers may or may not provide sample codes for all languages or platforms. For example, FedEx provides sample code for Java, C#, VB.net, and PHP, but no Python or JavaScript. In other words, if you search "FedEx shipping api integration PHP" or "UPS shipping api integration PHP example" or "integrate ups shipping API PHP" in Google, you can find helpful information. If you search FedEx shipping api integration JS, you may find it hard to get the developer resource you need.
6- The couriers have hundreds of thousands of employees, which determines their core business is to provide transportation services instead of API services. They have so many customers to support. Companies are unlikely to find people to deal with API problems promptly.
7- Some courier companies are government agencies. If something goes wrong, call them to ask about technical solutions and time to solve them. You can imagine how long this process will take. (If you are a company with tens of millions of dollars shipments, this may not count).
8- To get a shipping discount from the courier company, the company must go through many troubles (unless the number of shipments is large).
9- The API of the courier itself does not provide value-added services such as order management, capacity tracking, tracking page optimization, optimal website experience, and third-party insurance.
10- Most of the courier API documentation does not match the API test environment they provide, and their test API does not check their business type API. And there are lots of terms and conditions that we need to read through.
We know that the API use application and integration process for shipping and tracking is so complicated and costly through the above issues. Third-party shipment tracking and shipping service providers are born to solve these problems.
Conclusion
Integrating the APIs of multiple carriers one by one is a long and inefficient process, and incorporating third-party shipping and tracking API such as keydelivery API allows companies to access multiple carriers through multiple accounts at once. The API documentation of the carrier company is difficult to read and use, and their technology is relatively outdated.
They do not provide or only provide some code examples, and they do not encapsulate the API or may not support the language you are using. The third-party tracking and shipping service providers can solve this problem.
When the courier company's API encounters downtime and changes its documentation in a non-backward compatible way, the company needs to restart the integration. In addition, their technical support response may be slow, and you may not be able to solve the problem in time.
About KeyDelivery Merchant Fulfillment API
KeyDelivery has officially become a partner of FedEx, DHL, USPS, UPS and supports DHL shipping API integration, FedEx shipping api integration, USPS shipping api integration. You can find that integration documentation in our resource center.
KeyDelivery API Shipping Solutions Services are used by customers worldwide, such as Samsung, Uniqlo, Shoppe, Amazon, and Tencent. If you need help with the domestic and international shipping API integration in various languages such as PHP, Java, and Python, you can contact us at the email support@kd100.com. Our tech team will reply as soon as possible to solve your problems.
