I love Shippo as a product and even more so as an example of startups solving unsexy problems with technology.

Payments before Stripe and Square were a pain in the ass. Shipping is a similar backbone to the economy that, for businesses, just sucked.

Building one universal shipping API and taking advantage of carrier bulk discounts even for the smallest businesses makes a much more demonstrable impact than a chat bot.

Good on them. Also amazing blog name (Get Put Post.)

Thanks :) You can subscribe here for future interviews: https://tinyletter.com/getputpost

I had the pleasure of getting to meet the Shippo team recently. I have to say, I was incredibly impressed. Everyone I met there was incredible: down to earth, really nice, highly motivated. I'm sure this company / team will go really far and do really great things. The two founders I spoke with seemed like genuine, great people. They have a really strong vision =)

I'm also a huge fan of the way Shippo's API service works, and the way they price their product. They're one of the few developer companies charging really fair prices for their service, and pricing is straight forward, and encourages usage. None of that enterprise BS that everyone is so eager to provide now-a-days.

I hope to use them in a future project someday =)

Is Shippo comparable to easypost? What are the differences/benefits? Seems like Shippo is more for small businesses and offers a richer interface for managing things without having to first integrate the API? Easypost seems more directed at developers, but they also seems like they are hiring a lot of ux people so I would assume they are building their own management interfaces aswell. Just wondering if both serve the same use cases. I will be looking at integrating something like this into a product primarily for shipping label creation and I am curious how the two services differ.

Sawyer from EasyPost here. Yes, we're generally upstream of Shippo - we power a bunch of their competitors in the app / shipping UI space. We focus more on developer APIs and all of the tools and performance considerations that come with that.

Our UI developers are focused mainly on analytics for the platform - we're happy to leave the click n' ship piece to Shipstation, ShipRush, Shippo, etc.

Our product is the API and we’re very much focusing on letting developers build on top of it. Comparing shipping APIs is like an iceberg, you need to look below the water to see the difference.

Let's start with the technical stuff.

1. We've actively taken the route of having deep, certified carrier integrations with each of the shipping providers we support. For instance, we are an USPS ePostage partner, being one of the only 3 companies with a direct connection with the USPS (http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y16/m03/i17/s02). This means that we don't rely on any other APIs to generate USPS rates, labels etc. ensuring that our uptime is more stable (https://status.goshippo.com/) and less dependent on other systems.

2. We've built out an internal engine that generates shipping rates (and soon, labels) locally. This means that even if carrier APIs go down, you can generate rates through Shippo.

3. Being partners with carriers and forming good relationships means that we are able to get our customers better support with them. For instance, we're able to help connect customers to local USPS and DHL reps to help them better manage real-life ops. From a developer perspective, issues that we bring up are also expedited because we know who to go to.

4. We aggregate shipping volume across our platform to help negotiate for discounts with carriers. When you start with Shippo, you don't need an account to start shipping, we set you up with master accounts immediately (but of course, you can plug your own in).

The big picture stuff.

Our goal is to be there from a business' first order, all the way to being directly connected to their system and warehouses as they grow. This means working with both business/ops people and developers.

1. For SMBs/business/ops people, they can use our interface, which is built directly on top of the API, to access all the awesome things. They can manually upload orders, CSVs or use our shipping app on platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, etc.

2. For developers, all shipments created through the API automatically are synced to the dashboard. You won't need to build your own interface from scratch. Anyone can start manage shipping right away.

We want to make shipping easy for everyone - no matter what size your business is, or who you are at a company. Building an API to make this happen is the best way to do it at this day-and-age, but we believe that it's important to also make the power that the API provides accessible to everyone.

Shippo is great, we use it from our Weebly-based site. Between Shippo, Stripe and Square we've got pretty much what we need to run billing and shipping. Thank you, interwebs!

I'm sure this is not the intended use case, but considering the trouble I've had trying to use UPS/Fedex/USPS to print shipping labels for my personal use (many of the websites suck), it'd be great to see a desktop app that used this API to find the lowest cost service, print you a label for it, and track your shipment.

I've had a very similar instance.

USPS ShipNClick, for example, has "fraud detection" that freezes all accounts you've ever logged into if it detects that you've created multiple accounts and switched between them. And worse, it's a silent detection, so after you've entered all the details for your shipping label(s), it gives a "Your payment method was declined" error. No warnings or anything, just a vague error message.

When you call USPS online support, they're aware of the issue but they can't unfreeze accounts without "escalating" the issue. You get a callback in a few days saying that your account was "cleared".

I've gotten that exact error - good to know what was going on :P

Actually! We do offer a web interface for this exact thing. Many of our customers are small businesses who don't have developers to integrate the API, so we built a dashboard for them to compare shipping prices, print labels, and track shipments. (You can also use it even if you're not a business)

You can see a small gif of it working under "How you make money" in the interview. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*GDC26ygGdl49WKsb9Z...

Are you from Shippo? Would you mind if I contacted you directly to ask some questions? As it happens I'm in the process of comparing a few services like Shippo to purchase for a 3PL company and I'd love to be able to chat with someone. Email in my profile if you don't mind reaching out.

Yes, from Shippo here. Will shoot you an email. :)

edit: if anyone else would like to chat, sales@goshippo.com is the best place to get to us. That goes directly to a few of our inboxes, so we're get back to you in no time.

Is this it? https://app.goshippo.com/orders/manual

Yup that's it! (You'd need to sign up to access the app, but that's free to do.)

I'm currently working on that as we type: http://ezsend.it/

This is strictly for one-time shipments, targeted at the occasional sender. There are better solutions out there for small businesses.

Looks like they offer free tracking api even if you don't buy shipping through them, which is interesting: https://goshippo.com/pricing/

Yes, we do!

How is the eta of a shipment determined when tracking a shipment this way?

We get that data from the carriers directly at the moment.

OK. Thanks for the reply. So that might be a continually updated value, as opposed to an originally scheduled date? As a seller we have an interest in knowing when a package is delivered later than originally expected. I'm doing some programatic, carrier-specific things to monitor this internally, but would be interested in finding a way to this through something like Shippo's API. Basically, show me delivered and undelivered shipments that are beyond the originally scheduled/promised delivery date. Possible?

Yes, this should be continually updated (since it's (for the most part) pull from the same API that they have on their own tracking sites).

It won't ever say "this is later than expected" so you'd need to cache the originally scheduled date, but what you're doing should be possible.

We have a tracking analytics API for this at EasyPost that'll do the analysis - feel free to reach out to me for the details: my username at easypost.

Thanks for this article. I'm interested in the way you marketed your product to developers in early daus. What problems did you face and how fast did you grow in the first year? I'm currently looking for kind of a benchmark to compare if our API-first platform is on a good track.

Hey sedzia - from shippo here, saw your comment.

We actually just published this piece on Mattermark on how we sustained the business and build up our API in the early days. https://mattermark.com/focused-long-tail-get-traction-enterp...

Doesn't necessarily have benchmarks, but maybe the story will trigger some ideas.

I like the data science angle where they're using their large number of deliveries to make predictions for customers on when packages will arrive depending on carrier, route, day/time. Would be nice for a future blog post to show some stats on how accurate their predictions are.

Great idea! When we're ready to share the stats we'll definitely do something like that.

Site appears to be down - mirror?

Sorry, Medium and/or GoDaddy DNS sometimes has hiccups with the custom URL. This is the direct Medium link: https://medium.com/get-put-post/apps-that-send-packages-with...