Webhooks, Shipping and Event Notifications
Wouldn’t it be great if your shipping carrier could notify you when something happens with the package you sent? What if they could tell your platform about package events such as attempted delivery, completed delivery and delays. Imagine being able to delight a customer by sending them an email to grab their package from the front door after the the carrier dropped it off.
In the past, this would have been a difficult technical challenge, as you would need to consistently check the status of the tracking numbers for each item you sent, but with Shippo webhooks, you can ask Shippo to let your platform know about the life events of your packages.
Webhooks allow you to build or set up integrations which subscribe you to certain events about your shipments and labels. A webhook lets you register a URL that we will notify anytime an event happens in your account. They are becoming a more popular way for software platforms to interact with each other and share notifications about completed events.
Once we push the notification to you, what you do with it is only limited by your imagination. Here are some fun things you can do:
- Send an SMS to customer when a package has been delivered, or provide SMS updates about each step in the shipment.
- Send an email to your customer service team when a package is delayed so they can alert the customer if necessary.
- Play a sound in your office when batch of labels has finished printing
- Close out customer service tickets about packages in transit
- Create your own IFTTT
- For marketplaces: When a shipment is picked up, release funds
- For returns: When the customer sends back the item, issue refund
- Build a Kik bot to track packages
As you can see, there are many workflows you can automate using webhooks.
Get up and running with Shippo Webhooks in very simple. All you need to get started is a Shippo account and a URL to which Shippo’s servers push information. You can find the information for implementing webhooks in our developer documentation.
Learn more about the Shippo API, carrier integrations or check out success stories of companies that utilize Shippo for their shipping needs.
(Thanks MailChimp for the best stock pirate photo!)
Shippo is a multi-carrier API and web app that helps retailers, marketplaces and platforms connect to a global network of carriers. Businesses use Shippo to get real-time rates, print labels, automate international paperwork, track packages and facilitate returns. Shippo provides the tools to help businesses succeed through shipping.
