APIs Introduction
Understand the basics of Shipium's APIs.
About Shipium's APIs
Your organization can use a single Shipium API to meet a specific need, or take advantage of multiple APIs. Like standard APIs, ours enable communication between two application software entities, or endpoints, using rulesets and definitions. The following table describes in general what each API does; the Shipium's APIs page includes links to other documentation for each API.
The API | What it does |
|---|---|
Validates an address based on its deliverability before shipment and label generation | |
Creates shipping labels in batches with the ability to retrieve labels for up to 150 shipments in one API call | |
Selects the least expensive carrier and ship method that meets your criteria | |
Selects the least expensive carrier and ship method that meets your criteria and buys postage and retrieves label images | |
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Allocates inventory to shipments optimally in order to hit desired delivery dates (if provided) at the lowest cost | |
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Selects the best set of packaging types/sizes for the shipped items | |
Generates a return label for customers to return product(s) | |
Buys postage and retrieves label images | |
Provides a recommended ship-by date to meet your desired delivery date | |
Provides tracking event details for single or bulk shipments | |
Provides tracking event details for single or bulk shipments that were not generated via Shipium's Carrier and Method Selection |
About the general organization of the APIs
The Shipium APIs follow the REST, or REpresentational State Transfer, paradigm.
This means our APIs:
- use predictable resource-oriented uniform resource locators (URLs);
- accept JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) request bodies;
- return responses as JSON-encoded data; and
- use standardized response codes, authentication, and verbs.
You'll interact with our APIs using mostly the POST (meaning "create") or GET (meaning "read") methods.
Response codes and error conditions
Shipium responses generally follow the response codes in the following table. You can find more details in API Response Codes.
| Response code | What it means | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| 200 | Success! | You'll get back what you expected. |
| 4XX | Failure | Something at your end needs to be fixed for the API call to succeed. |
| 5XX | Failure | Something at Shipium's end needs to be fixed for the API call to succeed, or potentially an error from a carrier or other system on which Shipium depends needs to be resolved. |
About your test and production API keys
You'll be provided with two API keys when you create your organization's Shipium account: one for production and one for testing.
The testing API key will not work in production, and the production API key will not work in testing. This prevents you from accidentally impacting your production data while testing or pointing your production services at the test endpoint.
About API test modeThe Shipium API set has separate endpoints when you're in test mode. Working in test mode does not affect your organization's live data.
General format and syntax information
Authorization
Request authentication is via OAuth 2.0 using the authorization request header or authorization URL parameter. You can find more details in Authentication.
Date formats
All dates in the API are strings in the ISO 8601 "combined date and time representation" format. The following table provides Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and Pacific Time Zone (PT) examples:
| Date and time | Format |
|---|---|
| UTC Time | 2020-01-01T23:30:00Z |
| Time with PT | 2015-05-15T15:30:00-8:00 |
Resources
Your Shipium team member is available to help along the way. However, you might find these resources helpful:
Updated 13 days ago