In this article, you will find more information connected to the aspects of Magento shipping integration. We decided to reveal this topic because the competition in the shipping management software market is huge nowadays. Online shopping became very popular from day to day. That is why e-retailers are searching for software that can help them automate their operations and make their lives easier. One of such solutions is shipping management software.
If you are running such software for retailers, you probably know how important it is to meet all your clients' expectations and provide them with high-quality functionality. You must also understand the importance of integrating your system with various eCommerce platforms like Magento and its possibilities for your business.
So, we are going to discover how you can develop the connection between your solution and Magento platform easily and what benefits it can bring.
Shipping Management Software: Main Functions
Buyers' expectations today are shifting to instant gratification. People want to know where the item they ordered coming from and how quickly they can get it. It puts a lot of pressure on e-retailers. To get orders out to customers as quickly and efficiently as possible, they take help from specialized shipping systems. Such solutions help vendors to pick, pack, and ship all ordered products to their buyers. It highly increases the merchants' service level. As shipping is a crucial part of every e-retail business, it makes an excellent opportunity to build a profitable business on top of it.
A high-quality shipping management software should be able to perform such functions:
- increasing shipping accuracy
- picking and shipping items by various attributes
- tracking e-store clients' packages and sending shipping notifications
- update order statuses
- creating and printing shipping labels
- monitor and sync inventory levels
- providing real-time shipment metrics
If you want to satisfy your clients, you need to provide all these functions. However, markets are competitive, and the niche of shipping management solutions is no exception. Looking better to the customer's eye takes effort. A way to achieve this is having more to offer or being able to serve the needs of a broader range of customers. You can achieve both through integration with multiple shopping platforms.
The Difficulties of Developing the Connection with Shopping Platforms
Get connected with various shopping platforms is an excellent possibility that brings to shipping management system providers such advantages as a huge number of potential clients, a wider functionality range, and ultimately a revenue growth. However, to perform integration with eCommerce platforms is a tedious task. During the process of establishing the connection with platforms, you will meet two main challenges.
The first difficulty is to choose the shopping platforms that can bring you a significant number of benefits. The second one is to start developing a connection with them. And this is a technically complicated task that demands a lot of resources. It requires high budgets and months' of your developers' time. Also, don't forget that each integration needs its' further maintenance and update.
Solutions to the Problems
A solution to the first problem is to choose a platform that would bring more clients and gains than other ones. At best, it should be one of the largest and most popular shopping cart software, just like Magento. This market giant powers over 26% of all online stores worldwide. Being integrated with it can be beneficial for various services, and for shipping solutions in particular. That is because of more than 770,000 online store owners are Magento customers.
A solution to the second problem is a bit more complicated. Due to the different architecture and specific ways of data storage of every shopping platform, the process of integration with each of them becomes unique and troublesome. To perform it, you need to find a qualified programmer. He must have experience with a particular platform and would be able to elaborate on the integration module for it. It would take you both much time and vast expenses. However, it’s not the end of the story because you will need to spend more money in the future. That is because the module requires maintenance after it’s finished.
But there is a solution that can help with Magento shipping integration. It is API2Cart - unified shopping platform integration interface. Using it you can also save your money and time required for development of the connection.
How to Start Magento Shipping Integration?
With API2Cart, you can perform Magento shipping integration smoothly and get connected to many other top shopping platforms at once.
API2Cart is a reliable solution that helps shipping and other software providers successfully overcome two main integration challenges mentioned above. It offers a unified API that enables to establish a connection with Magento and automatically access to 40+ other shopping platforms simultaneously. Among the supported platforms are Shopify, Prestashop, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, X-Cart, and other well-known worldwide platforms.
Using API2Cart, you’ll get all the information necessary, including clients' names, shipping, and billing addresses easily. The service also allows you to get orders with related data and process them within your system. You can sync completed orders on various shopping platforms and meet all your clients’ needs.
How to Add Shipment Statuses Automatically?
API2Cart provides more than 100 API methods that helps shipping software providers to manage the data from Magneto e-stores. For example, using our API methods, your system will be able to automatically insert shipment tracking URL and update tracking info into the eCommerce stores. For this purpose, you need to use order.shipment.tracking.add method.
Also, you can create shipments and add tracking numbers to the orders using order.shipment.update and order.shipment.add methods. To update order statuses, you have to use order.update method.
As you can see, you can solve a significant number of your business cases using API2Cart.
In case you’re interested in the connection of your shipping system with Magento and other shopping cart software, you can perform it with the help of API2Cart. We provide 24/7 customer support. So, if you have any questions, schedule a сonsultation, and our expert will contact you and give the answers to all of them.
Notice that you can try all API2Cart functionally with no limits for 30-days for free and see how it helps you with Magento shipping integration. All you need to do is register your free API2Cart account and follow the instructions presented on this page.