I’m moving my shipping over to Shipwire, so I no longer have to ship things myself. For the most part it means slightly higher shipping fees for customers, but it also means things will ship more promptly - usually the day they were ordered - and with two warehouses, they’re often located closer to the buyers.
Is anyone else doing this? Any integration stories?
We’re not but it certainly sounds interesting. Keep us posted on how it works out for you.
I’m pleased to say that it’s going quite well, so far. Shipping prices are more expensive for some countries, but stuff ships (and generally, arrives) way faster. I just finished integrating Tindie and Shipwire using my order handling app, so now one command (or cron job) can pull in new orders, and another dispatches any shipwire fulfillable ones automatically. A third one grabs tracking data and sends it to Tindie, marking the product as shipped.
More Tindie APIs would be great here, since I’m still using web scraping for stuff such as marking as shipped.
I also have a tool that automatically generates shipping rates using Shipwire’s pricing API. That results in a lot of rates, but works out pretty well.
Here’s my post to customers about new shipping: http://www.arachnidlabs.com/blog/2014/09/06/introducing-arachnid-labs-new/
And here’s my order handling tool: https://github.com/arachnidlabs/pms/ - Tindie and Shipwire APIs can be found in the web directory.
