About shipment lanes

Your organization may need to manage your fulfillment center shipment lanes to ensure packages are sorted and loaded onto the correct carrier's trailer. Shipium supports configuration of shipment lanes to help you manage which package goes onto which trailer on the same calendar day for the same carrier service method.

Fulfillment contexts

In order to use Shipium’s APIs, your organization needs to establish your fulfillment network configurations within the Shipium platform. We refer to these configurations as Fulfillment Contexts. A fulfillment context allows you to configure the characteristics for your network origins, carrier contracts, label augmentations, third party billing, injection shipping, and tenants, in addition to other feature settings. Shipment lanes are optional but can be established for a fulfillment context.

Shipment lane assumptions

• Any number of shipment lanes may be added to a shipment lane sort configuration and any number of shipment lane sort configurations may be added to an origin so long as they do not share the same carrier definition.
• Uploading postal codes that conflict with postal codes on a shared origin will result in an error.
• A ZIP code can only be configured for one partnerLaneId per carrier service method.
• An API call response will only include shipment lane fields if the shipment was filtered by your configuration.
• When a shipment lane has a different carrier pickup schedule cutoff than your organization's carrier schedule configured for the same origin, the origin schedule will be overridden by the shipment lane carrier pickup schedule.

Configure your account to manage shipment lanes

In order to configure shipment lanes for a fulfillment context, you'll need to access Fulfillment Contexts in the Configure section of the lefthand navigation menu within the Shipium Console. These instructions assume you've already established a fulfillment context in the Shipium platform. If you haven't yet set up a fulfillment context, you can find guidance for how to do so in the fulfillment contexts documentation.

To locate the fulfillment context for which you wish to configure shipment lanes, you can use the search bar at the top of the Fulfillment Contexts homepage or simply scroll through a list of the available contexts. Once you've located the desired context, you can access it by clicking on its name.

Within the Shipment Lane tab of the context, you can add a shipment lane configuration by selecting the Add Carrier Method(s) Shipment Lane Configuration button within the message that there is no carrier shipment lane configuration associated with the fulfillment context or by selecting Add a Shipment Lane Configuration from the dropdown menu at the right of the screen.

Shipment lane sort configuration

To create a shipment lane, you'll first establish a shipment lane sort configuration, which combines individual shipment lanes. You'll provide details to be associated with the new shipment lane sort configuration, as shown in the following screenshot and detailed below.

• Carrier. Required. You'll select the desired carrier for the shipment lane sort configuration from a dropdown menu. Once you do so, you can select the desired carrier service method(s). In addition, available shipment lanes for the selected carrier within your configured fulfillment network.
• Service Method. Optional. You can select specific service methods for this carrier that you wish to associate with the shipment lane sort configuration
• Shipment Lane Configuration Name. Required. A human-readable name your organization will use to refer to the shipment lane sort configuration
• Shipment Lane Configuration Description. Optional. An optional description your organization can use to help you organize your shipment lane sort configurations
• Select Shipment Lanes. Optional. If you have shipment lanes already configured, you can select shipment lanes to associate with this shipment lane configuration from a list of available shipment lanes.

Shipment lane

Once you've established a shipment lane sort configuration, you can create a shipment lane. Within the Shipment Lane section of the Shipment Lane tab of the fulfillment context, you'll select the Add button; or, you can select Add a Shipment Lane from the dropdown menu.

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Use the default flag

Shipium recommends using the default flag for the shipment lane with your largest postal code set when configuring your shipment lane schedule. Only one shipment lane can be set as the default for each shipment lane configuration.

To create a shipment lane, you'll provide details to be associated with it, as shown in the following screenshot and detailed below. Some fields do not appear until the desired carrier is selected from the dropdown menu.

• Shipment Lane Name. Required. A human-readable name your organization will use to refer to the shipment lane
• Shipment Lane Description. Optional. An optional description your organization can use to help you organize your shipment lanes
• Shipment Lane ID Alias. Optional. An optional ID your organization can provide to reference in API call responses

Next, you'll provide Shipment Lane Schedule information. You can choose to provide no shipment lane schedule, use the origin schedule configured for the fulfillment context, or create a new shipment lane schedule.

• Shipping Days. Required. You will multi-select the days of the week your fulfillment center fulfills orders.
• Expected Days to Ship. Required. The number of days from when an order is fulfilled until when it leaves your fulfillment center; for example, if shipments typically leave your origin on the same day that the order was received, you'll select 0 for the expected days to ship. This value can be set at the hour increment.
• Shipping Cutoff. Required. The time of day when your fulfillment center stops shipping orders
• Weekend Cutoff. Required. The time of day on Saturday and Sunday when your fulfillment center stops shipping orders
• Effective Dates. Required. The calendar dates for starting and ending this shipment lane schedule
• Holidays. Optional. You can optionally select holidays your fulfillment center observes from the dropdown menu and you can provide custom holidays.
• Country. Optional. You can optionally select the country for which holidays apply.
• Custom Holidays. Optional. You can provide additional custom holidays, providing a name and date for each.
• Define Destination. Required. You'll select Default or Limit Destinations. Shipium recommends choosing Default for the shipment lane in this shipment lane sort configuration with the largest postal code set. If you opt to limit destinations, you'll upload a CSV file of your postal ZIP codes.

Shipment lane information returned in API response

The following table provides the shipment lane attributes that are returned in calls to Shipium's Carrier and Method Selection & Shipment Label API when the network information provided in the call matched your configured shipment lane information in the Shipium Console.

Shipment lane API response code sample

The following example includes the shipment lane information returned in the API call response.

ShipmentResponse : {
  ...
  "carrierSelection" : {
    ...
    "laneMatch" : {
      "laneId": "123145-asdasd1-23123asd12",
      "partnerLaneId" : "UPS-Chicago",
    }
    ...
  }
  ...
}

Resources

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

• Terms and Definitions

• Troubleshooting Guide

• Contact Shipium Support