Thinking of integrating with the DHL directly to ship with DHL SmartMail? There are a number of points to consider that affect cost, performance, and integration times.
First off, the DHL API is a SOAP / XML API. This can introduce problems of its own when attempting to parse responses from their API. Like all major carriers, DHL doesn't have an intuitive API that developers can immediately build an integration with.
Additionally, DHL doesn't provide any supported client libraries for any of their APIs. Regardless your programming language, you'll need to write your own client library to support it.
Info about the DHL SmartMail API can be found on the DHL Integrated Shipping Solutions page. It often takes at least a week to get access to their API, so prepare to wait a bit.
Dealing with DHL directly can take you up to three months to get up and running, if you're lucky. That's where EasyPost comes in.
EasyPost is a multi-carrier API with quick technical support and client libraries for all major programming languages.
The EasyPost API offers the following DHL SmartMail service levels: