Ship Options

Specify a ship option in your API call.

About ship options

You may optionally specify a shipOption parameter when constructing a shipment, using either the more popular Carrier and Method Selection & Shipment Label API or the Carrier and Method Selection API.

Doing this gives you the ability to specify the kind of shipment performance that you want. Shipium's software will select the appropriate carrier and method based on this shipment performance criterion.

Specify ship option

To specify ShipOption, include a value for it in the shipOption field that is part of the top-level Shipment object. You can do this either during shipment creation or in shipmentParameters when using the Carrier and Method Selection & Shipment Label method.

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Warning

This does not guarantee that some specific method is selected, but rather that an appropriate method is selected to meet the requirements specified.

The following example works for either use case, specifying that the shipment should use a "TwoDay" ship option:

{ ...
    ...
    "shipOption": "TwoDay",
    ...
    ...
    ...
}

Ship option values

You can specify your organization's configured shipOption values in the API call, or you can use one of Shipium's default shipOption values.

For guidance on configuring your own ship options, see Configurable Ship Options.

To use Shipium's shipOption values, see Shipium Default Ship Options.

FAQ

Q: What happens if an option is not available?

A: If a particular shipOption value is not possible, a 4XX error from either label creation or the all-in-one shipment and label method will give details about the problem.


Q: Can I include a desired delivery date (DDD) in addition to passing a ship option when using the all-in-one shipment and label method?

A: Yes. For example, shipOption: standard, desiredDeliveryDate: 2023-11-15 limits the carrier selection search to only those methods that are marked as standard and for which the DDD of 2023-11-15 can be met. If the DDD of 2023-11-15 cannot be met, Shipium will return the cheapest service method on 2023-11-16, and so on.

Resources

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