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.
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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
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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.