What are shipments?

Shipments are the backbone of any supply chain. Yet, there are many different requirements to consider when making your first shipment through the Shipwell API. The shipments endpoint offers the following benefits for developers:

• Unique shipment options not shown in the UI, such as shipment metadata
• Manipulate shipments data based on your ERP system
• Programmatically integrate shipments with your own application

This section gives describes how to create your first test shipment, including which prerequisites you'll need before drafting the shipment and breaking down each component required to make your shipment tenderable by a carrier.

Technical prerequisites

In order to build a shipment through the API, you must fulfill the following technical prerequisite:

• Have access to the Sandbox environment in Shipwell, including the ability to Authenticate into the sandbox environment with your account user-token .
• Either a command-line interface with bash or a tool such as Postman .

Other requirements

Although you can draft a Shipment through Shipwell's API with only metadata and customer information, the following pieces of data are required in order to make the Shipment tenderable. Gather the following data before creating your first shipment

• Mode and equipment type needed to complete the shipment
• Pickup and Dropoff locations, defined as Stops . Stops include:
  • Delivery address
  • Location type
  • Start and end times for the stop
  • Contact information for a stop representative
• At least one shippable line item or product, including
  • A description of the product
  • The product's approximate weight, including the unit
  • The quantity of the product