Book

Booking process

The process of shipping out shipments is called booking. We also call this book as in: to book an order.

Booking is be done through the Orders API in three different ways depending on the use case as described in the next chapter.

The booking process (for you as a customer) consists of a couple of steps:

1. Provide instructions per order and/or shipment for the booking process.
2. If there are shipments that can be shipped out via multi-colli, we will automatically collect and bundle them.
3. The Wuunder API requests the shipping labels at the carriers.
4. We will update our systems and keep track of any shipping changes from that moment on.
5. We will return the order and shipments with all known shipping details back to you.
6. The shipping labels can be retrieved from the API.

You, our customer, only need to tell us what carrier and product to use for the shipment. We take care of the rest.

Booking status

In step 1, we start requesting labels at the carriers that are applicable for your shipments. Your shipments will receive the shipment labels received from the carriers. The booking process is instantly kicked of the moment you call our API. You can wait for the API call to finish up. All our API endpoints are sync.

If the booking process at the carrier takes longer than usual, our API request will respond with the status that is known at that moment for the shipments in the order. These situations can happen from time to time when carriers have a backlog, their API is delayed or you have an order with lots of shipments.

In any case: you will receive an API response with the current order status and our systems will handle the remaining to-be-booked-shipments in the background. You can either request the status of the shipment at a later moment or wait for our webhooks to arrive at your system.

Booking instructions

There are three options you choose from to book an order with it's shipments:

You choose the rates for your shipment

1. Retrieve rates for orders and shipments (see rating). The API returns a list of rates per shipment in the order that you can use to book each shipment.
2. Book order and shipments. For each shipment you specify what rate should be used for the booking process. Shipments can be listed along with their selected rate as rate_selections in the book request.

This option is useful when you want your end-customers to have control over the pricing for your shipments. Think of a webshop where your customer can choose different shipping options.

Please note that when submitting a rate selection, the preferred_service_level still needs to be present. The preferred_service_level is only applied to shipments that are not assigned with the rate_selection.

You let Wuunder decide what fits your situation the best

1. Create order and shipments.
2. Book order and shipments and tell us what your preference is by using the preferred service level code. This code will hint us what rate/product we should use to book your shipment.

This option is most used by bigger systems that do not allow any rates selected beforehand. Most of our bigger customers use this option.

You combine the two methods

There is also a third option, by combining the two. You can choose the rates for the shipments you want and let Wuunder decide what rates to use for the other remaining shipments in the order.

If the booking process fails

The booking process can sometimes fail. If that is the case, we mark the shipment as booking_failed and the Orders API will return a response with the details of the error. To book a failed shipment it's possible to retry it through the Orders API or via the MyWuunder UI.

These are the most frequent cases a situation like this arises and how to solve it:

• Essential data is missing for a particular carrier:

  For instance: A carrier requires a shipment to contain the email address of the receiver. If that email address is marked as invalid by UPS, the booking process at that carrier fails.

  The received error should contain enough information to fix any missing data in the shipment. This can be done with our Orders API or through the My Wuunder UI.

• The carrier API is down and/or returning errors:

Carriers can have a backlog and their systems can go down from time to time. In any case, we retry to get the shipping label at that carrier but ultimately that can fail.

Booking can be retried with same carrier at a later moment or with a different carrier.

• A product is not available to book at the carrier:

  In some rare cases, it can happen that the carrier does not allow the product to be booked.

  If this happens, contact our tech support and we will help you out.