Shippo's October Product Round-Up: Walmart Integration, UPS Ground Saver, and Web App/API Improvements

Another month in the books and another list of product enhancements we’re proud to share. The holiday season can be the busiest time of the year for e-commerce merchants big and small, so it was extremely important to us that the product improvements we made in October would empower our users to make the most of the last two months of 2023.

One of the ways we did this was by adding an additional marketplace integration so that you can print labels for orders from all your stores in one place. We also launched a new cost-effective ground shipping service, improved our WebApp so that you can better handle an influx of orders, and even made some key foundational improvements for our API users!

Fulfill orders faster across multiple stores with the New Walmart Marketplace Integration

Walmart Marketplace is easily one of the best online marketplaces for e-commerce merchants as it sees more than 100 million visitors a month.

You can now sync your Walmart Marketplace store to your Shippo account. With this connection, orders that come in from your Walmart Marketplace store will automatically be imported to the Orders page of your Shippo account. This allows you to keep better track of all your orders and select discounted shipping labels from the nation's top carriers for your Walmart shipments. You can even connect multiple Walmart Marketplace accounts to a single Shippo account!

Check out our help center article to learn more about how to connect your Walmart store to Shippo.

Access More Affordable Shipping Options with UPS Ground Saver

For years, UPS has actively sought to help small businesses when it comes to optimizing shipping costs. The launch of UPS® Ground Saver on Shippo is yet another chapter in that story.

If you’re shipping small/lightweight packages containing low-value goods to residential addresses and that shipment is not time-sensitive, UPS Ground Saver is a great option.

With UPS Ground Saver on Shippo, you can expect the following:

• 2-7 business day delivery times
• Weekend deliveries
• Shipping to the 48 contiguous states of the U.S. 

Saturday deliveries have a 100% population coverage while Sunday deliveries have a 71% population coverage. If you’re looking for an affordable shipping option this holiday season and beyond, give this new service level a try!

Web App Upgrades: Improved Bulk Selection & Autosave

The holiday season often means trying to ship a large amount of orders all at once. But, not every shipment is the same. Oftentimes, an order may need a specific carrier service level, package size, and even extra features like signature confirmation.

With our new bulk bar Web App users can now select a large number of orders to purchase labels for all at once, and before label purchase, can choose to make adjustments to individual orders that were selected without losing the selection entirely. You can also now buy bulk labels with a single click rather than multiple clicks across three different screens, saving you time. With this new update, you can handle fulfilling a large number of orders more efficiently and with speed.

To further save time for Web App users, we’ve also implemented a new auto-save feature within the side panel. This means you no longer have to click “save” after adjusting your orders/shipments, saving you 2-5 clicks per order. You’ll also get feedback when information is invalid faster so that you can correct errors more quickly.

During peak season, time is of the essence. Having features that will save you time when handling bulk orders and when making adjustments to individual orders can empower your fulfillment team to get orders out the door faster. This can result in less wait times for your customers, which in turn can provide an overall better post-purchase experience for them.

API Updates: Python plus and ratings upgrade

At Shippo, we understand that to deliver the highest quality multi-carrier shipping software, our technical foundation has to be sound. We recently shared that we modernized our tech stack through a Python version upgrade (2.7 to 3.9) and a Django upgrade (1.6 to 3.x). This month we took it a step further by releasing an upgraded version of Python from 3.9 to 3.11.

With this most recent upgrade, our label generation process has become 20% faster for labels generated through our carrier accounts. This upgrade also enables us to serve 20% more volume using our existing infrastructure. This means we’ll be ready to support your increased shipping needs this peak season.

We’ve also continued to invest in our core framework and capabilities. By investing in a brand new rating infrastructure, we saw a 50% improvement in latency times and significant improvements in throughput. We’ll share more details about these investments in a future post.

We’ve improved the reliability of our API with better observability and minimized dependencies which will allow us to provide the highest quality shipping API software to our customers and partners moving forward.

‍Log in to your Shippo account to take advantage of these product enhancements today!