Consolidated shipments

Updated May 28, 20263 min read

Use consolidated shipping when parcels travel together on a single freight or international leg before splitting out to individual recipients. One parent shipment carries the consolidated batch. Several child shipments take each parcel onward to its final destination. Carriyo orchestrates both legs as a related set, with one parent reference and distinct tracking per child.

Two consolidation models exist in Carriyo, with different mechanics and different status behavior. Pick the section that matches your scenario.

Carrier-driven cross-border consolidation

Some international carriers offer dedicated consolidation services that bundle many small parcels into one logical international shipment for customs and freight efficiency:

FedEx International Priority DirectDistribution (IPD)
UPS World Ease
DHL Express Breakbulk

When one of these services is configured on the carrier account, Carriyo books shipments as a parent / child consolidated set. The carrier handles the international leg as one parent shipment, then de-consolidates at the destination country (typically after customs clearance) and delivers each child to its own recipient.

Status behavior: status updates on the parent cascade to the children automatically while the bundle is moving as a single freight shipment. Every child reflects what the parent is doing. After deconsolidation, the carrier starts reporting per-child status independently, and Carriyo picks those up via the standard Tracking mechanisms.

Hub-and-spoke consolidation

The other model is Carriyo-orchestrated. A parent shipment moves the consolidated load from origin to a hub on one carrier. Distinct child shipments then take each parcel from the hub to the final customer on a local last-mile carrier. The two legs are operationally independent: typically a freight carrier on the long-haul, last-mile couriers in the destination market.

Status behavior: the parent and children are tracked independently. The parent's progress doesn't change child statuses. Children can be booked upfront alongside the parent, or on-demand once the parent is delivered to the hub.

For the customer's tracking experience, Carriyo's tracking page recognizes when a tracking number belongs to a child shipment whose parent is still in flight. It shows the correct status: the customer sees "in transit" while the parent is on its way to the hub, even though their child shipment hasn't been picked up by the local carrier yet.

The model

            Parent shipment
            ─────────────
   Origin warehouse  ──────▶  Hub / customs clearance
                              │
                              │ (de-consolidation)
                              ▼
            Child shipments    each distinct: tracking, label
            ────────────────
                              │
                              ▼
                      Customer A, Customer B, Customer C

The parent and children are linked through shared references:

The parent shipment carries the consolidated load. Its pickup is the origin warehouse; its dropoff is the hub or the international destination.
Each child shipment is a normal Shipment with a parent_shipment_id reference. Its pickup is the hub (or the parent's destination); its dropoff is the final customer.

Whether parent statuses cascade to children depends on which consolidation model is in play. See the two sections above.

When not to use

Multi-warehouse split. When several warehouses ship to one customer, it's several independent shipments, not parent / child. There's no consolidation hub.
Multi-parcel single shipment. When one Shipment has several parcels going together to one address, that's just parcels: [] on the same shipment. Not consolidation.

How it fits with other modules

Shipping. Both parent and children are normal Shipments under the hood; only the relationship is special.
Post-purchase CX. Customer-facing tracking always shows the child shipment (the customer's parcel) and presents the correct in-transit status whether the parent is in flight or already de-consolidated.
Carrier configuration. Parent and children may use different carrier accounts (freight for the parent, last-mile for the children). Cross-border consolidation services like IPD, World Ease, and Breakbulk are configured at the carrier-account level.
Tracking. Child tracking uses the standard tracking mechanisms once the carrier reports per-child events.