Shipping APIs Made Easy
Our Story
Hi, I am Mark Sanborn, the creator of RocketShipIt.
If you've got a minute, I'd like to share the unlikely story of how RocketShipIt was born on November 27th, 2007.
It all started when I was helping my family's small business generate accurate shipping rates for their website. They were constantly frustrated that the shipping rates were always either too low or way too high.
At the time, they were relying on what is called table rates or zone rates. Zone rates group areas of a region together and offer a table of rates to help estimate the shipping cost of a package.
The first problem with zone rates is that they require you to adjust the fuel surcharge on a regular basis. At that time fuel prices were surging. In normal periods one might adjust the fuel prices twice a year but these updates were coming in weekly.
Another problem was that carriers started charging more for delivery to rural addresses. In Montana for example, it would often cost us more to ship a package 100 miles away than sending a package across the country.
We also needed a simple way to print shipping labels from orders placed through the website. Most carriers have an application for printing labels but they are extremely large, sluggish, and have poor support for integrating into remote databases.
I thought, there has to be a better way.
I wanted a simple way to generate accurate rates, get tracking information, and print labels right from the web browser.
I quickly found that most carriers have an API which you can request the actual up-to-date rate of any package including add-on services like insurance, COD, etc. They also offered the ability to generate shipping labels.
The only problem was their API documentation was far from simple. It was over 500 pages long! Most of the examples failed, I found inconsistencies, and discovered many things that are not in the documentation at all.
I spent countless hours going through thousands of pages of API documentation from UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL distilling it down to only the parts that matter.
Finally, I created an interface in which you can fetch rates, track packages and generate shipping labels with only a few lines of code -- RocketShipIt was born.
Today, one decade after RocketShipIt first started, we have now helped thousands of customers in dozens of countries ship packages all over the world.
We hope you'll consider using RocketShipIt to simplify your shipping project. Everything is easier with RocketShipIt behind the scenes!
