Introducing Business Logic to Your Shipping Labels
by Jillian Voege
Purchasing postage was much more simple in the past. You just had to do a little bit of simple math to figure out how many stamps you needed to send an evelope or a small parcel.
But now that shipping has become an indelible part of commerce, it's also become exponentially more complicated. Even if you stick with one carrier with negotiated rates, it's still tough to juggle all the different rules and surcharges that can be applied to your package. You also have to consider the customer experience, which determines the kind of service level you want to apply and whether or not you need extra shipping services.
Before, you had postage buyers who'd scour rate tables and would know all the little loopholes they could leverage in the SLAs of each service level. Now that purchasing postage is digitized, you can find the absolute lowest rate by using a Shipping API like ours. When you integrate with a Shipping API like EasyPost, you can set certain rules and filters that allow the API to return the rates you want at all times. This is called "business logic", a way for businesses to set rules that determine how data (in this case, shipping rates) can be created, stored, and changed.
By introducing business logic into your shipping process, there are two major benefits - you'll always be certain that you're purchasing the lowest possible rate for the service level required AND you automate a huge part of the label purchasing process. Instead of having to verify against rate tables manually, Shipping APIs can automatically purchase labels based on business rules and information passed from your ecommerce solution. One of the most time-consuming things about manually purchasing labels is ensuring that it's the right label for the order. A Shipping API with proper business logic installed can remove all of those inefficiencies so your employees can focus on improving other parts of your business.