The Key Benefits of Using Shipping APIs for Your Business Success

Introduction

Picture this: It’s peak season. Orders are flooding at lightning speed. Customers’ Where-Is-My-Order queries are piling up. Failed deliveries are becoming a serious issue. Your customer support team is overwhelmed and resources are stretched thin. 

Sounds hectic, right? That’s exactly the scenario business owners used to face before the existence of shipping APIs. They have revolutionized shipping operations world over.

If you’re an ecommerce brand just starting out and handling a few orders, it’s still manageable. However, when orders grow from 100 to 1000, managing the scale and the rising shipping costs becomes challenging without a proper system in place. Here, Shipping APIs take center stage. 

Shipping APIs help businesses coordinate with other platforms and make the process more synchronized. That’s just one aspect of it. Shipping APIs bring a lot more benefits to the table. 

In this article, we’ll look at the top 9 of them that make the shipping API a must-have in your tech stack. 

What is a Shipping API?

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s mainly a set of rules that allows different systems to communicate and send data to each other. Likewise, a shipping API helps applications to share shipping information with each other. A shipping API integration allows you to automate the entire logistics process and make it more coordinated. 

Most shipping software operate using shipping APIs. A shipping API integration with your eCommerce website will let you access shipping capabilities within the website itself without any back and forth.

9 Key Benefits of Shipping API Integrations

If you’re still confused about whether or not you should integrate with a shipping software that uses shipping API, here are some key advantages for e commerce platforms that come with it. 

1. Automation of the entire supply chain

As an eCommerce business owner, you have lots of work and responsibilities on your shoulders — inventory monitoring, strategizing marketing campaigns, solving customers’ queries, planning new product lines, and more. Now, if you spend your time manually comparing shipping rates and generating shipping labels, you’ll get less time to focus on other activities of your business. 

Shipping APIs help a lot in such cases. From order creation, tracking, and sending automated delivery updates to your customers to returns management, it takes care of everything without any manual intervention. Consequently, it speeds up the shipping mechanism and keeps your business safe from manual errors. Over time, it can bring your business significant cost savings.

Which brings us to the next point.

2. Lower operational & logistics costs 

Shipping is considered one of the most costly aspects of the entire delivery journey. Handling carrier costs, managing lost shipments, and managing reverse logistics can add up to the shipping budget. 

With ecommerce shipping APIs, you'll be able to bring in much needed cost savings and invest your resources in other pressing aspects of your ecommerce store. Wondering how? Well, a shipping API enables you to compare rates across multiple carrier partners and helps you discover discounted shipping rates. You can confidently assess the most cost-effective shipping options, increase your efficiency and save money for your business. 

At the same time, it handles failed delivery reports in an automated way to help you avoid return costs. They also help in route optimization to help you save on fuel costs.  

3. Improved checkout experience for customers

Before hitting the buy button on your ecommerce site, customers always want to know two things. First, how much they’ll have to pay for the order, and second, when they will receive the item. Now, manually contacting customers to let them know about these aspects every time they place orders is not possible. 

Thanks to the shipping API, it automatically fetches the estimated delivery dates from other portals and shows them as soon as a shopper enters his zip code. It also fetches the delivery charges from the associated carriers to help customers in their buying decisions. You can even offer your customers multiple shipping options.

4. Real-time shipment monitoring for better efficiency

Imagine the hectic process you’d go through if you were to visit each carrier’s tracking portal to pull shipment statuses and then again update them in your system. Not only is the process time-consuming, but it is also prone to errors. 

There are mainly two types of shipping APIs at your disposal that can help in such situations — pull API and push API. While pull API enables you to retrieve data from carriers’ portals with a simple API call, push API automatically sends this information to the backend of your system.

This will allow you to monitor each shipment carefully as it moves through fulfillment centers for better operational efficiency. You will also be able to automate sending of tracking notifications to customers.

5. Increased shipping flexibility 

Courier APIs give you total control over your entire delivery journey. First off, it presents you with real-time rates across logistics partners, allowing you to pick the right one for your business. Second, it gives you the flexibility to customize the tracking page and delivery notifications.

Third, it gets integrated with multiple types of platforms you run your business on - be it Order Management Systems (OMS), Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), CRMs, and ERP systems, making it easier for you to streamline the entire process. It can also enable you to handle international shipments with greater ease.

6. Reduction in shipping discrepancies 

In a perfect world, brands will never face delivery discrepancies and glitches like stuck shipments, delivery delays, or fake or failed delivery attempts. 

In reality, these are major issues that can eat up a huge chunk of your profit. Shipping APIs help in this case as well. Since it offers comprehensive shipping information on a unified platform, you can monitor every activity in the journey.

A shipping API integration also offers delivery alerts way before they arise, so you can take action beforehand. Not to mention, the right shipping API can come up with a dedicated fake delivery management system to reduce shipping errors.

Most importantly, it cross-checks delivery addresses to ensure each order reaches its destination without any issues. 

7. A smoother and more cohesive delivery process

Shipping APIs connect multiple platforms and make the process more efficient. And when the process is coordinated, it creates a seamless experience for both the business owner and the customer. With increased operational flow, merchants can deliver items on time without any hassles and improve customers’ post-purchase journey. 

If you look at the other side of the coin, merchants don’t even need to burn the midnight oil to get everything done right. With a shipping API, delivery management becomes a breeze. These are key to a good customer experience.

8. Higher delivery rate 

Shipping APIs have been specially designed to improve delivery rates. They come up with dedicated systems like the NDR management system to ensure a lesser return-to-origin rate. This automated NDR management system streamlines communication between delivery agents and customers to make each delivery successful.

Also, they fetch the most suitable carrier for shipments to improve delivery rate. In addition, it detects errors in delivery addresses and offers flexible delivery windows for delivery success. 

9. Improved customer satisfaction

Courier APIs also take care of customers' post-purchase experience on many levels.

Doing these, shipping APIs improve customer experience and enhance customer loyalty for your business through increased customer satisfaction.

How ClickPost’s Shipping APIs Help Make the Shipping Process More Streamlined?

ClickPost is a logistics intelligence platform connecting retail and e-commerce businesses to 500+ carriers. Its data-driven logistics intelligence platform offers a host of shipping carrier APIs that offer significant benefits. These shipping APIs work to manage your shipping workflow and streamline your entire shipping process.