Skip to main content

Inform warehouse systems of the ideal ship-out date

Use planned_ship_date and estimated_transit_days together to schedule warehouse tasks and enforce fulfillment cutoffs. Knowing a predicted delivery date is only useful if your warehouse knows the latest date an order can be picked, packed, and handed to the carrier to achieve it. The Estimate API’s planned_ship_date is the ship-out date you are committing to, and estimated_transit_days tells you the transit window from that date. Together they enable automated warehouse task creation, pick queue prioritization, and same-day cutoff enforcement.

How it works

When you call POST /v2/estimates, pass the planned_ship_date that reflects your intended handoff to the carrier — typically today’s date at the warehouse’s daily carrier pickup or drop-off cutoff time. The response echoes planned_ship_date back in UTC and returns estimated_transit_days on each prediction, so you can calculate and display the full fulfillment timeline. For warehouse scheduling, planned_ship_date is the ship-by target. Your system must create and complete the pick/pack task before that datetime.

Request

Pass the warehouse cutoff time as the planned_ship_date. In this example, the warehouse closes carrier handoffs at 3:00 PM PDT (22:00 UTC).

Response

Push tasks to your warehouse system

Once the customer selects a service level at checkout, extract planned_ship_date and estimated_transit_days from the matching prediction and send them downstream to your warehouse management system (WMS) or fulfillment queue.

Enforce carrier cutoff times

The planned_ship_date you pass into the request defines the cutoff. If an order is placed after your warehouse’s daily carrier handoff time, bump planned_ship_date to the next day’s cutoff (skip days your warehouse is closed) and re-call the endpoint — the delivery date predictions will update accordingly.
For orders with tight fulfillment windows, consider calling the Estimate API with confidence_level: "HIGH"(see Provide conservative commit dates) so the predicted delivery date accounts for real-world variability before you commit it to the customer.
Last modified on October 23, 2026