Direct Carrier Connections

Direct Carrier Connections gives you a real-time integration to the freight carriers you already work with — LTL, VLTL, and truckload carriers such as Estes, XPO, Old Dominion, FedEx Freight, Saia, and others. Rather than building a separate integration for every carrier's own API, you connect to each carrier once through Shipwell and use the same consistent set of operations for all of them.

Behind the scenes, every carrier's API looks a little different — different fields, different authentication, different response formats. Shipwell normalizes these differences so you can send one consistent request shape and get a consistent response back, no matter which carrier you're working with. This is the same normalization approach used by the Public Load Board API, applied here to your direct carrier relationships instead of spot capacity marketplaces.

Direct Carrier Connections is a good fit when you have a contracted, direct relationship with a carrier and want to interact with them in real time through the API. If instead you need to exchange data with a trading partner over a Value-Added Network, see EDI; if you need access to spot capacity across load boards, see Public Load Boards.

What you can do

With a carrier connected, you can:

• Rate — Request a price and transit-time quote from one or more carriers for a shipment.
• Dispatch — Tender a shipment to a carrier, have them accept, decline, or confirm it, and track the booking through to delivery.
• Track — Receive shipment status and location updates from the carrier as the shipment moves.
• eBOL — Request an electronic Bill of Lading and PRO number directly from the carrier.
• Documents — Pull carrier-held documents for a shipment, such as the Bill of Lading, Proof of Delivery, and invoices.

Not every carrier supports every operation — see Supported Carriers for the current capability matrix.

Typical workflow

1. Connect a carrier in the Shipwell application by supplying and validating its account credentials.
2. Request rates from one or more connected carriers for a shipment.
3. Dispatch the shipment to the carrier you selected.
4. Track the shipment as the carrier updates its status.
5. Request the eBOL and pull delivery documents as they become available.

Access

Direct Carrier Connections must be enabled for your Shipwell account, and each carrier must be added individually. Contact your Shipwell representative to enable Direct Carrier Connections and to request that a specific carrier be connected to your account.

All API requests use the same Shipwell authentication described in Authentication. Connecting a carrier additionally requires that carrier's own account credentials — see Getting Started.

Carrier Rules & Markup

Once connected, a carrier can optionally be restricted to certain lanes or customers, and rates can have markup applied automatically — both configured in the Shipwell application. See Carrier Rules & Markup.

Reliability

Carrier connectivity is monitored continuously, and current status is published at status.shipwell.com. See Reliability & Status for more.

Start here

Follow Getting Started to connect your first carrier.