
Apps that send packages with the Shippo API - robee
https://getputpost.co/apps-that-send-packages-with-the-shippo-api-6184d909ccb1#.tn2wzmtmu
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tyre
I love Shippo as a product and even more so as an example of startups solving
unsexy problems with technology.

Payments before Stripe and Square were a pain in the ass. Shipping is a
similar backbone to the economy that, for businesses, just sucked.

Building one universal shipping API and taking advantage of carrier bulk
discounts even for the smallest businesses makes a much more demonstrable
impact than a chat bot.

Good on them. Also amazing blog name (Get Put Post.)

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gwintrob
Thanks :) You can subscribe here for future interviews:
[https://tinyletter.com/getputpost](https://tinyletter.com/getputpost)

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rdegges
I had the pleasure of getting to meet the Shippo team recently. I have to say,
I was incredibly impressed. Everyone I met there was incredible: down to
earth, really nice, highly motivated. I'm sure this company / team will go
really far and do really great things. The two founders I spoke with seemed
like genuine, great people. They have a really strong vision =)

I'm also a huge fan of the way Shippo's API service works, and the way they
price their product. They're one of the few developer companies charging
really fair prices for their service, and pricing is straight forward, and
encourages usage. None of that enterprise BS that everyone is so eager to
provide now-a-days.

I hope to use them in a future project someday =)

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kmnc
Is Shippo comparable to easypost? What are the differences/benefits? Seems
like Shippo is more for small businesses and offers a richer interface for
managing things without having to first integrate the API? Easypost seems more
directed at developers, but they also seems like they are hiring a lot of ux
people so I would assume they are building their own management interfaces
aswell. Just wondering if both serve the same use cases. I will be looking at
integrating something like this into a product primarily for shipping label
creation and I am curious how the two services differ.

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sawyer
Sawyer from EasyPost here. Yes, we're generally upstream of Shippo - we power
a bunch of their competitors in the app / shipping UI space. We focus more on
developer APIs and all of the tools and performance considerations that come
with that.

Our UI developers are focused mainly on analytics for the platform - we're
happy to leave the click n' ship piece to Shipstation, ShipRush, Shippo, etc.

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zwieback
Shippo is great, we use it from our Weebly-based site. Between Shippo, Stripe
and Square we've got pretty much what we need to run billing and shipping.
Thank you, interwebs!

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funkysquid
I'm sure this is not the intended use case, but considering the trouble I've
had trying to use UPS/Fedex/USPS to print shipping labels for my personal use
(many of the websites suck), it'd be great to see a desktop app that used this
API to find the lowest cost service, print you a label for it, and track your
shipment.

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mylifeisshan
Actually! We do offer a web interface for this exact thing. Many of our
customers are small businesses who don't have developers to integrate the API,
so we built a dashboard for them to compare shipping prices, print labels, and
track shipments. (You can also use it even if you're not a business)

You can see a small gif of it working under "How you make money" in the
interview. [https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*GDC26ygGdl49WKsb9Z...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*GDC26ygGdl49WKsb9Z83ZQ.gif)

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grahamburger
Are you from Shippo? Would you mind if I contacted you directly to ask some
questions? As it happens I'm in the process of comparing a few services like
Shippo to purchase for a 3PL company and I'd love to be able to chat with
someone. Email in my profile if you don't mind reaching out.

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mylifeisshan
Yes, from Shippo here. Will shoot you an email. :)

edit: if anyone else would like to chat, sales@goshippo.com is the best place
to get to us. That goes directly to a few of our inboxes, so we're get back to
you in no time.

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ikeboy
Looks like they offer free tracking api even if you don't buy shipping through
them, which is interesting:
[https://goshippo.com/pricing/](https://goshippo.com/pricing/)

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laurabw
Yes, we do!

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shanecleveland
How is the eta of a shipment determined when tracking a shipment this way?

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mylifeisshan
We get that data from the carriers directly at the moment.

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shanecleveland
OK. Thanks for the reply. So that might be a continually updated value, as
opposed to an originally scheduled date? As a seller we have an interest in
knowing when a package is delivered later than originally expected. I'm doing
some programatic, carrier-specific things to monitor this internally, but
would be interested in finding a way to this through something like Shippo's
API. Basically, show me delivered and undelivered shipments that are beyond
the originally scheduled/promised delivery date. Possible?

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mylifeisshan
Yes, this should be continually updated (since it's (for the most part) pull
from the same API that they have on their own tracking sites).

It won't ever say "this is later than expected" so you'd need to cache the
originally scheduled date, but what you're doing should be possible.

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sedzia
Thanks for this article. I'm interested in the way you marketed your product
to developers in early daus. What problems did you face and how fast did you
grow in the first year? I'm currently looking for kind of a benchmark to
compare if our API-first platform is on a good track.

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mylifeisshan
Hey sedzia - from shippo here, saw your comment.

We actually just published this piece on Mattermark on how we sustained the
business and build up our API in the early days.
[https://mattermark.com/focused-long-tail-get-traction-
enterp...](https://mattermark.com/focused-long-tail-get-traction-enterprise/)

Doesn't necessarily have benchmarks, but maybe the story will trigger some
ideas.

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geomark
I like the data science angle where they're using their large number of
deliveries to make predictions for customers on when packages will arrive
depending on carrier, route, day/time. Would be nice for a future blog post to
show some stats on how accurate their predictions are.

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mylifeisshan
Great idea! When we're ready to share the stats we'll definitely do something
like that.

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aftbit
Site appears to be down - mirror?

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gwintrob
Sorry, Medium and/or GoDaddy DNS sometimes has hiccups with the custom URL.
This is the direct Medium link: [https://medium.com/get-put-post/apps-that-
send-packages-with...](https://medium.com/get-put-post/apps-that-send-
packages-with-the-shippo-api-6184d909ccb1)

