Integrate CartonCloud And Shippit To Make The Last Mile Easy

The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the face of eCommerce and 3PL fulfilment and with Christmas just around the corner, it is more important than ever to be able to scale up and deliver orders in a timely fashion.

Which is why integrating CartonCloud’s warehouse management platform with Shippit’s last-mile delivery technology is now critical for any 3PL company.

For many of CartonCloud’s users, integrating with locally-developed shipping aggregator Shippit has already provided the platform to complete a highly automated e-commerce solution to support business growth. Shippit allows customers to get the cheapest rate from a number of carriers including Fastway, CouriersPlease, Auspost, Startrack and more. 

By integrating Shippit into their CartonCloud platform, clients can now enjoy all the benefits of the Shippit platform as a part of a seamless workflow that delivers maximum efficiency and real savings. With some customisation you can even integrate eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce.

Using a simple API, the one-way integration issues a CartonCloud Sale Order to create a shipment within Shippit. It transfers the delivery address, sales order items with the respective weights and creates the shipment record within Shippit. Once the data has been transferred to Shippit a tracking number is created and added to the Sales Order in CartonCloud.

This integration is designed to be flexible, with the option to include some additional custom fields that can be mapped to fields within Shippit. 

“CartonCloud is a great piece of technology,” Shippit Joint CEO and co-founder Rob Hango-Zada, said. “The ability to integrate the two platforms quickly and easily provides a range of optimisation benefits for eCommerce businesses.”

“Our whole goal, our mission, is about improving how retailers optimise the supply chain from beginning to end, and for many of our customers the integration between CartonCloud and Shippit is critical to that.”

Rob believes the rapid growth of eCommerce during the COVID-19 pandemic had highlighted to many retailers the need to automate as many aspects of their business as possible, particularly last-mile order fulfilment.

“The real winners of the last six months have been those businesses that were set up to scale and didn’t have to spend time and resources dealing with the logistical challenges of a massive increase in volumes.”

“This ability to scale quickly is one of the key value-adds of the CartonCloud platform and when partnered with Shippit it is a great solution to manage and de-risk end mile delivery.”

One of the reasons the CartonCloud and Shippit integration has been so successful for 3PL businesses is the simple process to bring the platforms together and the high levels of automation once integrated.

“We are moving more and more quickly into a codeless world where retailers need to be able to switch technologies in and out, in line with their changing scale and operations,” Mr Hango-Zada said. “The last thing you want to be constrained by is technical integration.”

“Success in eCommerce is about being agile and we aim to provide that role in the end mile fulfilment part of the supply chain. With CartonCloud our clients can enjoy the full benefits of a best of breed platform with easy adoption.”

CartonCloud Integrations Manager Gigi Fleiner believes Shippit’s key benefit is to give 3PL and other logistics businesses some buying power over their last-mile delivery costs.

“Shippit takes a lot of the hassle and guesswork out of sourcing the best price for fulfilment and with so many carriers on their books, you can be confident of getting very competitive rates,” she said.

The first version of the Shippit integration was driven by demand from CartonCloud clients and was first launched in December 2018. While there have been some minor refinements along the way the integration continues to function in much the same way as the first iteration.

“Our clients first started jumping on board with Shippit a few years ago and were quickly asking us to find a way to make the platforms work more seamlessly together,” Gigi said.

“The process remains very simple… once an order has been picked and packed ready for dispatch we send an order to Shippit who find the best rates from their suite of carriers. The order is then tracked and delivered in Shippit.”

Connections to Shippit need to be configured by the CartonCloud team and can take just a few days to be up and running.

To learn more about the CartonCloud and Shippit integration visit our Knowledge Base article here