One of the critical features of any eCommerce shipping management system or delivery company is the ability to provide shipping rates for e-store clients.
Online merchants may build their e-stores on different shopping platforms. For example, they can choose Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or any other less popular platform. What impact does this have on your software? If you need to provide your solution to a large number of e-merchants, you have to develop an integration between your system and the shopping platforms your merchants use. Without such a connection, you cannot access the data required from your clients' online stores, which means you won't be able to offer your software features to e-merchants at all. Learn more about how API2Cart handles store connectivity across different eCommerce platforms.
In this article, we explain how to develop integrations with various shopping platforms and how to work with live shipping rates easily using API2Cart.
What are Live Shipping Rates?
Live shipping rates, also called real-time shipping rates, let e-store clients see the exact shipping cost involved in their order before checkout. In other words, live shipping rates are real-time, carrier-calculated rates rather than flat or estimated fees.
e-Merchants use various shipping software to present shipping rates to their clients automatically. Such solutions generate quotations from carriers during the order creation process. In addition, they let e-store clients stay on the order page while exploring the delivery services and charges applicable to their shipment.
Solutions that provide real-time shipping rates functionality need to retrieve the order weight automatically, along with the origin and destination details. This eliminates the need for e-store customers to enter such information again.
If you provide shipping management software, a real-time shipping rates widget, or represent a delivery company operating in the eCommerce sphere and want to add similar functionality to your solution, you can do it easily using API2Cart.
API2Cart is a unified API that simplifies building a real-time shipping rates integration between shipping solutions and multiple eCommerce platforms. It provides 100+ API methods that allow accessing and managing data on products, orders, customers, shipments, and more. For related order-level functionality, see how to add shipment tracking to orders via API2Cart.
Below you will see which API2Cart API methods are needed to work with live shipping rates.
How to Work with Live Shipping Rates Using API2Cart?
API2Cart provides a few API methods that help you work with live shipping rates:
- basket.live_shipping_service.list.json
- basket.live_shipping_service.create.json
- basket.live_shipping_service.delete.json
These methods are supported for Magento 1, Magento 2, Shopify, and WooCommerce, making it possible to build a real-time shipping rates app for Magento, Shopify, or WooCommerce stores without maintaining separate integrations for each platform.
Let's explore in detail how to start working with live shipping rates using API2Cart. First, you need to create a new shipping service on the online store using the basket.live_shipping_service.create.json method. You need to specify the service name and a callback URL that will return the shipping rates to API2Cart. Every time an e-store client reaches the checkout page, we send you all the necessary information; your system analyzes the shipping costs and sends us the final price, which API2Cart then passes to the e-store.
The basket.live_shipping_service.list.json method allows you to get the list of live shipping services for a specific store, while basket.live_shipping_service.delete.json makes it possible to delete a live shipping service for a particular store.
To use this functionality on WooCommerce, the e-merchant needs to install the WooCommerce Plugin by API2Cart.
API2Cart provides detailed API Documentation, where you can find examples of requests and responses for all our API methods. If you want to keep your shipping data in sync in real time, check out how to use webhooks for real-time store data sync with API2Cart.
To start working with API2Cart and try out all our API methods, register a free trial account. If you have questions about API2Cart pricing or need more details on our shipping API pricing plans, don't hesitate to contact our managers by chat, email, or phone. We are ready to help you 24/7.
