Industry
Logistics & Supply Chain Software Development — Built by a Team That Shipped It
Shipplx is a logistics SaaS we built that automates shipping operations for high-volume Purolator merchants — rate shopping, label generation, tracking, and billing reconciliation, all self-serve. We did not prototype it. It is live, used by real merchants, processing real shipments. That is the standard we bring to every logistics engagement.
The challenges we solve
Carrier APIs are poorly documented and full of edge cases
Purolator, Canada Post, UPS — their APIs work until they do not. Address validation quirks, postal code service availability, dimensional weight rounding, and return shipment handling all behave differently in production than the documentation suggests.
Manual shipping operations do not scale with volume
At low volumes, manual rate checking, label printing, and invoice reconciliation is painful but manageable. At scale, it becomes a bottleneck that caps your growth. The inflection point arrives faster than most operators expect.
Reconciling carrier invoices is expensive guesswork
Most businesses accept carrier invoices without verification. The discrepancy between quoted rates and invoiced amounts — fuel surcharges, dimensional weight adjustments, address correction fees — is consistently significant. Automation makes it visible and recoverable.
What we build
Multi-carrier API integration
Logistics SoftwarePurolator, Canada Post, UPS, FedEx, and DHL — normalized into a single data model with real-time rate shopping, label generation, and tracking aggregation.
Shipping automation and self-serve platforms
SaaS DevelopmentSelf-serve portals that let merchants create shipments, get rates, generate labels, and track orders without manual intervention — the Shipplx model applied to your operation.
Invoice reconciliation and billing automation
Enterprise SoftwareAutomated matching of carrier invoices against shipped orders, discrepancy flagging, and reporting that gives finance teams visibility into actual shipping costs versus contracted rates.
Warehouse management system integration
Enterprise SoftwareConnect your WMS to carrier APIs, ecommerce platforms, and ERP systems — so order release, pick and pack, and shipment close-out happen without manual data entry between systems.
Real-time tracking and customer notifications
Logistics SoftwareAggregated tracking data from multiple carriers, proactive exception alerts, estimated delivery date updates, and branded customer-facing tracking pages.
Cross-border shipping and customs documentation
Logistics SoftwareCanada-US shipping with automated customs documentation, HS code classification, CUSMA certificate generation, and broker integration for commercial shipments.
Common questions
What are the biggest integration challenges with the Purolator API?
Three main areas: address validation (Purolator rejects addresses that Canada Post accepts, and the error messages are not always clear), postal code service availability (not all services are available for all postal codes, and this changes), and dimensional weight calculation (the rules differ by service level and destination). We have navigated all of these building Shipplx.
Can you build a multi-carrier rate shopping platform?
Yes. We normalize each carrier's rate API response into a consistent data model — transit time, price, service level, surcharges — and present a unified comparison. The complexity is in handling the different authentication methods, rate structures, and dimensional weight rules each carrier uses.
How do you handle high shipment volume without API rate limiting?
We implement a request queue and caching layer between our application and the carrier APIs. Rate lookups for common origin-destination-weight combinations are cached with appropriate TTLs. Bulk operations use asynchronous job processing rather than synchronous API calls.
Can you integrate our existing WMS with a shipping platform?
Yes. The typical integration: WMS releases a pick list, our system fetches the order details, gets rates, generates the label, and passes the tracking number back to the WMS and your OMS. We build this as a message queue-based integration so neither system is blocked waiting for the other.
What does carrier invoice reconciliation actually catch?
Consistently: dimensional weight recalculations where the carrier measured differently than the merchant, address correction fees applied without notification, fuel surcharge discrepancies, and cases where a guaranteed service missed its commitment without the credit being applied. The dollar value depends on volume, but it is rarely trivial.
Do you have experience with cross-border Canada-US shipping?
Yes. Canada-US commercial shipments require customs documentation — commercial invoice, CUSMA certificate for qualifying goods, and sometimes a formal entry by a licensed broker. We have built automated customs document generation into shipping workflows and have experience with the requirements on both sides of the border.
Services we use in this industry
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