Packing advice

Ongoing improvements

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

PuzzlPack provides packing advice by combining items. This advice is build on the containers that are setup on your account. Containers are shown with a warning signal when they have no rates.

The packing advice, by combining items into containers, is returned as packing_instructions, which contains the steps how to combine the items into the container. The response also contains the shipment blueprints that can be used to create an order. Some items might not fit into containers, meaning they will not be part of the packing instructions and instead are listed as not_packed_items. These items are listed in the shipment blueprints.

PuzzlPack focuses on saving on transport by combining items in the most efficient way. This can in turn lead to higher transportation costs for a shipment, especially if not all items could be combined. The output can be used to compare and decide which scenario has the most benefit to you. The combined prices of the containers and not_packed_items can be checked before sending in an order, this can be done with the blueprints_price and the original_price that PuzzlPack returns. The original price shows the price the given items would cost sent as-is, and the blueprints price shows the price after the packing advice is taken into consideration.

There is a possibility that the packing advice cannot be given, in this case errors are returned by PuzzlPack.

The shipment blueprints that are returned are ready to be used, with a few minor caveats:

Currently the value is set to 0, as the value is not important during the packing advice, but for customs for example this is still important to have.
Customer references on items and shipments in the order API are considered as an identifier at Wuunder, albeit not unique. As the combined items cannot have a single customer reference from one of these items, a new reference is created as "PUZZLPACK-uuid". This customer reference can be used, but feel free to change it before creating a new shipment.

After consideration on these points, the shipments are ready to be used in the orders API as shipments.