from Hacker News

Multi-Piece Shipment Support Available in the Shippo API

by mikhaill on 7/13/16, 7:06 PM with 6 comments

  • by numlocked on 7/13/16, 9:22 PM

    I confess I don't totally understand shippo; in the event that you are a business of the size where multiple-carrier headaches are coming into play, aren't you also of the size where you need a proper order management, inventory management, and warehouse management system? And those systems tend to have address validation, shipping integration, label creation, etc. as built-in features. I don't know why I'd roll my own versions of that stuff on top of their API layer.

    It's definitely a valuable API, but I'd be more likely to take advantage of it if I were a new SaaS company building logistics software -- Shippo would be a great shortcut to get to market with the aforementioned features. At that point I'd be capturing more value in the form of my LoB software than Shippo could ever capture in their (essentially) cost+ pricing model.

    I don't get it -- but I feel like that's my fault and I'm missing the market, so maybe someone can enlighten me.

    Edit: Also this was an interesting read and clever solution to a tricky migration problem!

  • by charlesz on 7/13/16, 8:07 PM

    This is really great for Shippo, and an issue that I've commented on before[0]. It's a pretty obvious feature to have missed in the first place, but taking on the insane complexities of UPS, FedEx, and USPS is a never-ending up-hill battle (I've done it.)

    I'm still longing for the day that Shippo is fully fleshed out so I can offload that massive infrastructure headache off to someone else.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11871297

  • by chrissnell on 7/13/16, 8:37 PM

    What's the value proposition here, besides multiple carrier availability? I was able to create multi-piece shipment labels with the FedEx API in 1999. The API was stupid-simple and easily implemented in Perl back then. Are you offering volume discounts even when that volume is split amongst a host of carriers? I never saw the point in using multiple vendors as a small-/medium-sized shipper. It was easier to stick with one and have only one set of shipper-provided supplies to worry about.

  • by throwaway745234 on 7/13/16, 7:42 PM

    It seems to me that it would've been both easier and more logical to turn it into many-to-many, but I guess easier would've made the article less interesting.