Shipwire API
At a Glance
Shipwire makes it easy for web designers and developers to connect applications to the Shipwire Platform and take advantage of rating, fulfillment, inventory, and tracking update web services.
- XML APIs make it straightforward to exchange information with the Shipwire Platform.
- Our help section has a lot of information to make integrating web sites and applications easy.
- Please also see our help section for lists of shopping carts and business tools like PayPal® that have already been integrated with Shipwire.
- For organizations or individual developers that have small business applications (ecommerce, inventory management, accounting, etc.), you may want to review our Application Alliance Program and Affiliate Programs. Integrating with Shipwire may be lucrative for you.
Available APIs
- Fulfillment Services – Order Submission
- Inventory Services – Real-time Inventory
- Tracking Services – Order Tracking and Status
- Rate Services – Optimized Shipping Rate Quotes
Getting Started
Recommended steps:
- Sign-up for a free Shipwire test sandbox account. This will allow you to test your API calls in an isolated test environment that mimics our production system.
- Sign-up for a free Shipwire trial account. This will allow you to test your API calls in the production environment.
- Sign-up as a Shipwire Partner/Affiliate. This will get you access to marketing tools and a tracking code. Learn more about our shipping affiliate program.
API Conventions
HTTP Requests
All of our service APIs are invoked via HTTP POST requests to a secure (HTTPS) endpoint.
Content and Encoding
Unless otherwise specified, requests should be posted with a Content-Type of application/xml, UTF-8 encoded.
<Server> element
You’ll find that most of our APIs let you specify your server environment, either Test or Production. Requests posted with the “Test” server environment specified simply return well-formatted responses for basic testing of your parser. Requests posted with the “Production” server specified return actual data based on information in the associated Shipwire account. If “Production” requests are posted against your sandbox account, these simulate expected behavior in a real Shipwire account.
Response Status
Most of our APIs return a <Status> element. In the case of a successful request, this element will have a “0″ or “OK” value. In the case of a failed request, the element will have an “Error” value.