Shipping setup
Use Shipping setup to configure everything the shipping engine needs before it can book shipments: the carrier accounts you ship through, the rules that pick among them, and the SLAs you attach to each shipment. Configure it once; the engine reads it at runtime on every booking.
Shipping covers the shipment object itself (its lifecycle, how it's booked, how it's tracked). This group covers what you set up beforehand, and mirrors the Shipping Setup API spec.
What sits in this group
- Carrier configuration. The carrier accounts your tenant ships through, plus the attached costing, network, and capacity profiles that describe what each account can do.
- Automation. The umbrella concept covering the shared rule engine (rulesets, priority evaluation, conditions) used by both Shipping rules and Service levels.
- Shipping rules.
The carrier-selection rules. At booking time, when a shipment
doesn't carry an explicit
carrier_account_id, the rule engine walks the merchant's applicable ruleset and picks an eligible account based on shipment data. - Service levels. The timing-SLA rules. Compute the customer promise plus three internal SLAs (processing, collection, delivery) at the appropriate lifecycle moments.
When you touch each piece
Setup is mostly one-time activity. After the initial configuration lands, ongoing changes are typically:
- New carrier or service → add a carrier account, attach profiles.
- Carrier capacity changes (peak season, outages) → adjust capacity profile.
- New origin country → assign a network profile.
- New merchant on the tenant → grant access to the relevant carrier accounts and rulesets.
- Service expansion (new region or delivery promise) → author new Shipping rules and Service levels.
Most of these are operator actions in the Dashboard; the API is there when you need to provision programmatically (multi-tenant admin tooling, infrastructure-as-code style configuration).
How shipping setup fits with shipping
The booking flow described under Shipping → Booking flow reads everything configured here at runtime:
- Carrier selection walks the Shipping rules ruleset to pick an eligible carrier account, checked against network and capacity profiles.
- Rate computation uses the carrier account's costing profile if Carrier Shipping Rates is off.
- Service-level assignment computes the four SLAs from the service-level ruleset and attaches them to the shipment.
If a shipment lands unexpectedly (wrong carrier, wrong SLA, no eligible account), look first in Shipping setup. Check which ruleset fired, which rule matched, and which profile was attached.