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