Rating

Rating requests a price and transit-time quote directly from one or more connected carriers for a shipment.

How it works

Rating is asynchronous: you submit a rating request describing the shipment (origin, destination, weight, dimensions, accessorials, and so on) along with which connected carriers to request quotes from, and Shipwell returns a rating request ID immediately. Shipwell then reaches out to each requested carrier at the same time, so you don't wait on a slow carrier before hearing back from a fast one.

A typical rating request follows these steps:

1. Create a rating request — describe the shipment and the carriers to quote.
2. Shipwell fans the request out to each carrier in parallel.
3. Poll for status and rates — check the request until it reaches a completed state, then read the rates each carrier returned. Rates can also be streamed back as they arrive, rather than polled for.
4. Compare and select a rate — each carrier's response is normalized into the same shape, so rates can be compared directly regardless of which carrier returned them, even though every carrier's own pricing API looks different behind the scenes.

A rating request completes once all requested carriers have responded (or timed out); a carrier that doesn't respond in time simply won't have a rate in the results.

Rates from your connected carriers appear alongside your other rates in the Shipwell application (for example, on a shipment's Rates tab), each showing the carrier, service, delivery date, transit time, and price:

Endpoints

• POST /rating — create a rating request.
• GET /rating/{rate_request_id}/status — check the status of a rating request.
• GET /rating/{rate_request_id}/rates — get the rates returned so far or once complete.
• GET /rating/{rate_request_id}/tasks/{rating_task_id}/rates — get the rate(s) from one specific carrier within the request.
• POST /rating/quote — a simpler, synchronous quote from a single carrier (legacy, still supported).

Volume LTL

Some carriers also support Volume LTL (VLTL) rating alongside standard LTL rating — useful for shipments too large for standard LTL pricing but not a full truckload. See Supported Carriers for which carriers offer VLTL.

API reference

Coming soon.

Next steps

Once you have a rate you want to move forward with, use it to dispatch the shipment to that carrier.