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Direct Carrier Connections

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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.

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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.

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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.

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What you can do

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With a carrier connected, you can:

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

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Typical workflow

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  1. \nConnect a carrier\n in the Shipwell application by supplying and validating its account credentials.\n
    2. \n
  2. \nRequest \nrates\n from one or more connected carriers for a shipment.\n
    3. \n
  3. \nDispatch\n the shipment to the carrier you selected.\n
    4. \n
  4. \nTrack\n the shipment as the carrier updates its status.\n
    5. \n
  5. \nRequest the \neBOL\n and pull delivery \ndocuments\n as they become available.\n
    6. \n
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Access

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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.

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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.

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Carrier Rules & Markup

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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.

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Reliability

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

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Start here

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Follow Getting Started to connect your first carrier.

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