Overview Flow Guide

This guide will walk you through a streamlined process for using Easyship shipping API to seamlessly integrate and manage your shipments from start to finish.

By following this guide, you'll quickly dive into essential functionality and learn how to collect shipment details, retrieve shipping rates, select a courier, create shipments, generate labels, and keep track of your shipments through real-time updates. Whatever needs you have, Easyship will simplify your shipping experience.

Before you begin

As a prerequisite on your side, you will need sender and recipient addresses, dimensions of a package, weight of all items to be delivered and delivery terms to create a shipment.

Step-by-step description

1. Request rates. Use Request Rates to retrieve a list of available shipping options and their corresponding costs based on shipment destination, package, total dimensions, and weight.
2. Select a courier. After obtaining the rates, select a courier from the options returned by the Request Rates API. Your choice can be based on cost, delivery speed, best value for money, or other preferences. You can automate this step by applying Shipping Rules.
3. Create a shipment. Use Create a Shipment to create a new shipment with previously selected courier. Add delivery and packaging details in this step.
   1. Here's a How to Create a Shipment guide to help you.
   2. To save time and optimise your costs, you can create batches of shipments.
   3. By adding parameters buy_label and buy_label_synchronous(not supported in batch creation), you can decide the label generation behavior in the same request. However, this might extend the processing time depending on the couriers' response.
4. Generate label. Once the shipment is created, use Create a Batch of Labels(v2024.09 and newer) or Create Labels(v2023.01 and older) to confirm the shipment and generate a shipping label with other shipping documents. Generating the label will trigger delivery. From this step, shipment information will be transferred to the courier.
5. Obtain tracking updates. You can track the shipment status in two ways:
   1. Via the Trackings API: send requests from your service to obtain real-time information about shipment location and status.
   2. By setting up Webhooks: Easyship will automatically send information updates to your service whenever the shipment status changes.