Terminology

Ongoing improvements

We are actively working on improving this documentation. The contents of this page may be incomplete and are subject to change.

To understand better what our API can offer, it's best to keep the following terms into mind. You will encounter these terms along all API documentation.

Booking

The process of informing the carrier you want to use their services and generating a shipping label to attach to the parcel/pallet/document. Wuunder can retrieve your labels from carriers or generate custom labels.

Carrier

A transport company that moves parcels, pallets or documents from its origin to its destination.

Draft

A shipment or order in a so called draft state, means that they are not ready to ship out. Until you are ready, you can change the data to get it to a state that both are ready to be shipped out.

Label

A label generated at a carrier. Also known as a shipping label. The label itself always belongs to one shipment. A label contains all the information that is needed to get the package from its origin to its destination.

Multi colli

The process of creating labels for multiple shipments all at once. When a carrier supports this, you can save costs and time.

Order

A collection of shipments. An order always contains one or more shipments and always belongs to a receiver and a sender. The sender would be you, the API user. The receiver could be your end customer. The idea behind an order is to indicate which shipments belong to each other. Apart from this, it also gives you the advantage to make use of the Wuunder multi colli features. This is more efficient for you and the carrier and most of all: it saves money

Note that shipments within an order can be shipped out from different origins to different destinations. It could well be that you have multiple warehouses and/or your customer wants to receive certain shipments on different addresses.

Order line

An item within a shipment. Think of something like a mouse and keyboard. A shipment could contain both items because they are shipped into one box. Providing this data to Wuunder is valuable for two reasons:

Depending on the carrier and the destination, sometimes an exact specification of what-is-inside a shipment is required. This is used by customs.
If you want to backtrack what shipment you've shipped out, it may come in handy when you've provided Wuunder this information. It can make your life easier when dealing with customer support.

Order receiver

The person or company that will receive the shipment. This can be a different address than the destinations of the underlying shipments.

Order sender

The person or company that will sends the shipment. This can be a different address than the origin of the underlying shipments.

Parcelshop

A parcelshop, is a pickup point where a customer can pickup their shipment instead of sending the shipment to a business or residential address (the receiver address). This could be a manned parcelshop or unmanned lockerbox. Wuunder offers a variety of different carriers who support this service. The availability may vary per pickup location and/or carrier. In most cases the address of the parcelshop is mentioned on the shippinglabel instead of the receiver address.

Pickup address

The collection or pickup address is the location where the carrier will collect the shipment(s). This is in most cases the sender address but could also be another address. For instance in case of drop shipments.

Preferred service level

A code that indicates what kind of rate/product should be used by Wuunder during the booking process when you let Wuunder take care of selecting the best rate for you. These preferred service level codes consist of two parts divided by a semicolon :. The format is carrier_code_or_matcher:product_code_or_tag.

A couple of examples of valid preferred service level codes are: any:cheapest, post_nl:fastest, post_nl:postnl_brievenbuspakket.

As said, the code consists of two parts:

A carrier selector

This so called carrier selector can be any or the code of the carrier.

A product selector

This is the so called product selector. This can be either a product code or a tag. An example of product code could be POSTNL_BRIEVENBUSPAKKET.

If you prefer to use a tag, you could use one of the following tags:

cheapest
fastest
most_efficient

Receiver address

The address where a package will be send to. The destination address. This term is applicable for shipments.

Rate

A shipping rate is in most cases the total price you pay to ship your shipment via a specific carrier service excluding VAT (for instance DHL For you or DPD Home). The rate is a combination of a specific product (or so called service) a carrier offers combined with an estimated delivery date (speed of delivery), pickup date (speed of collecting your shipment) and additional services like insurance, signature, etc. The rate consist often a basic fee, fuel surcharge, toll fee, customs paperwork and additional fees for specific options, like insurance, attached to the product.

Rating

Rating is the process of determining which rates are applicable for which shipment. Rates are the results of the rating process.

Sender address

The address that will be visible on the shipping label as the address where the shipment was sent from, also known as origin address. Note that the sender address is by most carriers also regarded as the return address. This is the address where shipments are send to when they could not be delivered to the receiver.

Shipment

A transportable physical container. This can be a box, letter, pallet etc. Basically everything that can be transported from its origin to its destination. Such a container may contain one or more items. A shipment always has a sender address and a receiver address.