Shippo’s December Product Round-Up: Address Book, Insurance Expansion, Rating API

With the holiday season in its final stages, we at Shippo have worked hard to make sure you're not only getting the best peak season shipping experience possible, but that you can carry that momentum into the new year.

With the ability to save recipient addresses, the increase in insurance coverage, and an improved Rating API, you can send packages faster, safer, and more reliably than ever.

Save Time Shipping With Shippo’s New Address Book

Loyal customers are the lifeblood of any effective business. In fact, studies show that returning customers spend 67% more than new customers. To keep your customers coming back, one of the things you’ll need to ensure is a consistent and timely shipping experience. With the launch of our new Address Book feature, you can do just that.

Web App users can easily save a recipient address during the label creation process as seen below.

Once an address is saved, it can be searched and used for any future label, making the label generation process faster and more efficient than ever before. You can search for an address by typing parameters like name or company. By using the address book, not only do you save time, you reduce shipping errors and ensure packages are getting delivered to the correct address every time which helps protect your bottom line and ensure customer satisfaction.

You can also save and edit addresses at any time by navigating to your Settings and clicking “Recipients” under the Address book section in the left-hand column. Once you’re there, simply click the “Add address” or “Edit” which will allow you to specify the recipient details.

Best of all, this new feature verifies addresses before you save them into your recipient book. This helps ensure that you’re using addresses that are verified to be accurate/correct, which helps prevent running into lost packages or invalid deliveries down the line.

Start using Address Book today to ship orders to your returning customers more efficiently, giving them the post-purchase experience they expect.

Ship With More Peace of Mind with Expanded Shipping Insurance Coverage

Earlier this fall, we announced a new shipping insurance partner (XCover) which resulted in more items being covered than before. For example, TV screens and computer monitors were added as part of the list of covered items. That list has grown even more as items such as antiques, artwork, and computer parts are now eligible for coverage too*.

This added list of items is in addition to the several upgrades made this fall from our new partnership with XCover which include:

• Porch piracy coverage: Protect packages in the event of theft.
• Global coverage: Protect items originating from countries outside the U.S.
• No minimum fees: Cover all your packages without any minimum fees, no matter how much the item is worth. This means insuring a $10 package costs pennies.‍
• Faster claims process: 90% of XCover claims are resolved and reimbursed in 3 business days or less.

With these shipping insurance upgrades and an added list of items covered, you can protect all your packages during peak season and into the new year.

*Please note that these items are only eligible for domestic U.S. shipments. Antiques, artwork, jewelry, watches, ceramics, and glassware will also incur a 25% deductible when filing a claim.

Major API Upgrade with New Rating Service

In a project that has accounted for two years of planning and development by our engineering team, we’ve built the foundation for our current and future Rating API. This will help our API customers in massive ways.

For example, we can now support 600 rating requests per second which is a 5X throughput improvement. Customers can now get rates back much faster than before with latency times reduced from ~2 seconds to ~0.9 seconds.

API users who are trying to scale their business and require fast performance don’t have to worry about scalability issues when it comes to Shippo. Our Rating API is also only getting faster so we’re able to handle a massive amount of API calls for a massive amount of shipments now and onwards.

To learn more about our recent API advancements, check out our latest engineering blog. And to find out how Shippo can serve your shipping needs in 2024, talk to a shipping expert today.