About perishable items

Perishable items are a specific category of items that can be shipped, but carriers prefer to be notified about them.

These items are prone to becoming unsafe for consumption if they are not shipped at the appropriate temperature. Shipping them at the appropriate temperature prevents spoilage.

Although shipping perishable items usually doesn't affect the overall cost of packages, we highly recommend you provide this information. This is so we can share it with your organization's carriers for any relevant shipments. This can ensure that proper precautions can be taken.

Specify perishable items in shipments

In order to allow Shipium to choose the best carrier and method for your packages, your organization will need to specify that one or more items contained in the shipment are perishable when calling Shipium's application programming interfaces (APIs). In addition to other item properties that are passed, such as productId and quantity, you can specify that an item is perishable.

Perishable item information is provided within shipments as part of the orderItemQuantities field. Specifically, you should include perishable in the field shipmentParameters.orderItemQuantities.productDetails for any applicable products, as shown in the example below.

Example API request including perishable item

The following example shows perishable item information passed as part of the productDetails:

curl --location 'https://shiptime-service.stage.shipium.com/api/v1/shipment/carrierselection/label' \
--header 'X-MEGA-PROCESS-VERSION-OVERRIDE: 2' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'Accept: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer <>' \
--data '{
    "currencyCode": "usd",
    "generateLabel": true,
    "labelParameters": {
        "currencyCode": "usd",
        "customLabelEntries": {},
        "includeLabelImagesInResponse": true,
        "labelFormats": [
            "zpl"
        ],
        "manifest": true
    },
    "shipmentParameters": {
        "fulfillmentContext": "ana-upsmi",
        "shippedDateTime": "2023-05-06T11:00:00.000Z",
        "orderedDateTime": "2023-06-06T16:30:00.000Z",
        "desiredDeliveryDate": "2023-06-10T11:00:00.000Z",
        "referenceIdentifier": "166165427",
        "purchaseOrderIdentifier": "00000199990166165427",
        "testMode": true,
        "destinationAddress": {
            "name": "Chris Consumer",
            "phoneNumber": "5555555555",
            "company": "N/A",
            "street1": "2901 ne blakely st unit 400",
            "city": "SEATTLE",
            "state": "WA",
            "countryCode": "US",
            "postalCode": "98103",
            "addressType": "residential"
        },
             "shipFromAddress": {
            "name": "Big Store",
            "company": "N/A",
            "street1": "4285 Buford Hwy",
            "city": "Atlanta",
            "state": "GA",
            "countryCode": "US",
            "postalCode": "30345",
            "addressType": "commercial"
        },
        "orderItemQuantities": [
            {
                "productDetails": ["perishable"],
                "productId": "12345678",
                "quantity": 1,
                "hazmatInfo": {}
            }
        ],
        "packagingType": {
            "packagingMaterial": "box",
            "packagingSizeName": "test-package",
            "packagingWeight": {
                "weight": 15,
                "weightUnit": "lb"
            },
            "linearDimensions": {
                "height": 6.13,
                "length": 12,
                "linearUnit": "in",
                "width": 0.7
            }
        },
        "shipmentTags": [
            "test"
        ],
        "totalWeight": {
            "weight": 15,
            "weightUnit": "lb"
        }
    }
}

Resources

Your Shipium team member is available to help along the way. However, you might find these resources helpful: