Getting started
Shipwire makes it easy for web developers and designers to connect their applications to the Shipwire platform and take advantage of rating, fulfillment, inventory, and tracking update web services.
- Shipwire XML APIs provide direct, electronic access to key platform services.
- Our help section has a lot of information to make integrating web sites and applications easy.
- If you are looking for a pre-integrated solution, Shipwire already connects with many shopping carts and marketplaces. You can find a list of pre-existing connections here.
- 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 Program. 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
Next Steps
- Look over the available APIs, and familiarize yourself with what you can do. Use the Shipwire test form to play with sample requests/responses.
- 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 a 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.