If you’ve been investigating shipping APIs from major carriers hoping to find a simple way to get real-time rates or purchase labels you’ve probably realized that a “basic” shipping integration is still going to take too much time and resources.

To compare, integrating Shippo’s shipping API takes an average of 4 to 6 hours. We make it simple for you by outlining the 5 key steps here in our creating first shipment guide. We currently offer API wrappers in Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, Node.JS, and C#. We also have community contributed libraries in Perl and Go. You can find all of our client libraries in the documentation.

A single integration into Shippo, will get you access to over a dozen US, European and global carriers, such as a USPS API, FedEx API, DHL API and many others–all in one simple integration. You can view the complete list of carriers here.

The Shippo shipping API is most often used for the following shipping-related operations:

• Retrieving shipping rates
• Purchasing shipping labels
• Validating U.S. addresses
• Creating customs documents
• Tracking a shipment’s status

If you want to see how companies are currently using our shipping API, check out our Customer Showcases.