Designing Your Shipping Solution

It is tempting to build a very minimal shipping integration and determine user demands from there. Shippo’s research has shown that this often leads to less than desired adoption rates. With almost a decade of experience in the online shipping industry Shippo recommends the following as a minimum set of functionality at launch. These functions fall into two categories: Order Fulfillment, the ability to buy a label and ship a parcel for an order, and Administration, functionality needed to manage payments, carriers, and other administrative functions.

• Label Generation
  • Rate Shopping
  • Single Label Purchase
  • Batch Label Purchase
  • International Label Purchase and Customs Forms
  • Refunding an unused label
  • Creating return labels
  • Tracking
  • Split Shipments
  • Create a Manifest or Scan form
• Administration
  • Carrier account management
  • Webhook Management
  • Parcel Template Management
  • Address Management
  • Payment Account Management
  • Shipment Transaction History

In the section that follows we will explore the use cases and user stories associated with the above features.