Hey everyone! I built something for developers who work with shipping APIs and wanted to share it.

The problem

I had an e-commerce client who wanted to compare rates across Shippo, EasyPost, and ShipEngine at the same time. They noticed rates fluctuate depending on the route, time, weight, package dimensions, and which carriers each provider surfaces. Some providers return UPS options that others don't.

The catch is each provider has a completely different API. Different auth methods, different request schemas, different response formats. Supporting all three means building and maintaining three separate integrations.

What I built

RateShip is a single REST API that sits in front of all three providers. You connect your existing provider API keys, make one request, and get back a unified, normalized list of rates sorted by price. It also handles label purchasing and webhook delivery for tracking events.

How it works

• Connect your Shippo, EasyPost, or ShipEngine API keys (encrypted)

• Make one POST to /api/v1/rates with your shipment details

• RateShip fans out to all connected providers in parallel.

• Results come back normalized into a single schema, sorted by price

• Pick a rate, buy the label through the same API, get a tracking number back

• Handle webhooks from each provider, normalize and send it to you.

Resources

• Site: rateship.io

• Docs: rateship.io/docs

• SDK: npm install rateship

There's a free tier (100 rate requests/month, 10 labels) if anyone wants to try it out. Would love any feedback, especially from anyone who's worked with these shipping APIs before.

So they say there's a way to make It work, had the 1team plugin team try to get it to work. But still no luck. About to get another site built OFF WordPress because WordPress just makes me wordless and it's a pain in the ass.

But still I'm trying to figure out if anyone has gotten saturday shipments to work with shippo or if I need to figure out a different setup.

Looking for something headless that has multi-carrier support, integrates with my platform (Shopify), and can print labels FAST (important). A lot of these apps I've seen don't seem to have all 3, at least from the ones I've found myself which is why I'm here. Figured you all might know better than me. Thanks

Hello, I am a developer helping a friend with their prestashop website. They are having problems with their Shippo account, they want to make automatic labels, but can only do it for existing customers. Every time a new customer orders they have to manually enter shipping details. I’m not too versed in Shippo, but that is a typical feature of shipping platforms. From what I can see online it is possible to do, so does anyone have experience creating automatic shipping labels with Shippo? Also, does anyone have experience working with Shippo through prestashop? Please send in your recommendations!

Does anyone have any recommendations over which Shipping APIs are better? I'm looking at Shippo, ShipEngine, EasyPost, and Stamps, and I'm not sure which offer better-discounted rates and value.

Thanks.

Developing eCommerce store in laravel and was wondering if there's any free or extremely cheap APIs for pulling live shipping rates from USPS only for when user inputs dimensions + weight to calculate price. I just need it to output a price amount in text, not perform checkout options on the 3rd party platform.

There will probably be about 300-400 requests per day.

I have an ecommerce and have been using Shippos api's for rates and label purchasing but wanted to start creating Orders in order to use the automatic email tracking updates(saves me from having to build my own system from scratch with webhooks and mailers etc...)

So far, my api call gets a success message with the Order object. However, I dont see the test Order in my dashboard... Is that normal for test orders?

Save me from cold sweats before deployment lol

I’m trying to help my friend create a form shipping label. I’m in charge of the backend and he said to use the single list API call. There’s a step by step on the main shippo website but I unfortunately don’t understand it. I’ve used node for user profiles involving schema, models and mongoDB for databases. But for creating a shipping label I have no idea how to begin or understand how to go on about this problem. My initial thought was to create routes but that goes back to models which these forums don’t seem to have. Any guidance would be great, sorry for dumb questions but I’m new at this

I really need to get live international shipping rates up and working, but ecwid just won't cut it. It's a minimum of $1200 dev time just to get the basics working and that doesn't include getting tracking numbers from shippo, or actually creating the label.

Is there a store front that completely integrates with shippo?

Shipping rates at checkout is the hardest thing in the world to do apparently.

Any tips on where to go next would be appreciated!

Anyone using their personal DHL account with Shippo? How did you get it to work because for the life of me I can't get it to work, Shippo is telling me in logs that my site id (API key) is wrong but DHL devs insist it's accurate, i even contacted Shippo and they said the API key is wrong, am so vexed right now, anyone know a solution to this problem?

Sorry for the Rant

Need some guiadance from folks with shopping platfoms build "from scratch" ...

Once a cusmoter provides his address we need to automatically calculate shipping charges/estimates so we can estimate total price and send to payment processing. Then, autopurchasing and label geneation.

Which solution or software API should we use?

P.S. I looked at a few websites like shipstation but those seems like just shipping purchasing after the fact and looks manual(but i might be mistaken)

Anybody have for alternatives?

We don’t need actual shipping just estimating shipping costs.

I work for a shipping company called Shippo. We build shipping APIs and dashboards to make shipping awesome for thousands of e-commerce businesses.

As a part of our work, we often get asked questions on how to reduce shipping costs. So we made a collection of our most frequently given advice on how to optimize shipping on our blog. Hope it can be of use for this community as well.

Here's the post!

Edit: We recently published a post on alternative USPS shipping methods if you're looking to stay with them, but vary your packing style a bit.

Hello friends. I use my Woocommerce based Webshop to sell large sized products around the US. Think large washing machine size. I would like to integrate some sort of shipment API so i can calculate shipping rates before checkout. Right now i just add a flat fee which sometimes works out great, most times makes me loose money.

What is a common provider that people use for this? Regular FedEx etc won't do as the product is too bulky and too heavy. Thanks!

Any one else getting “unable to create order” ?

I have the live and test api, I have it synched to the postal carrier, I have the weight etc for the item I am trying to test in the woo cart and have followed the instructions shippo suggests and still it comes up with a system error at checkout. I am sure it is something really simply I have missed. Did anyone else have this issue and if so what was the fix?

We are building a B2B marketplace where our sellers handle shipping (they have their own UPS/Fedex accounts). What is the cheapest shipping API to get real time shipping rates from our sellers accounts. Our sellers don't need additional services like insurance and label printing, the only feature we are looking for is real time shipping rates.

Shipstation is the worst system. So many of the API connections have faults and bugs. For example, with a particular carrier the system reports a different base cost for a label compared to when you actually purchase it (eg overcharging). Or you can't ship a package with your own custom box size and must select the default and amend the measurements.

Their support team seem to have about four braincells between their entire team, and cannot comprehend anything even if you send screenshots. Multiple attempts to refund through a carrier and they will absolutely not do ANYTHING to help you (even though carrier insists it must be filed through their account). They seem to have no idea how their own system works, insisting certain things to you that are just plain wrong and untrue.

So, what are the alternatives? I cannot operate a business with Shipstation being part of it any longer. I am in Canada, FYI.