Anyone who ships more than 20 boxes a day knows how annoying it is to keep copy and pasting the customers information for the shipping label. Therefore it is a great thing that both UPS and FedEx offer the ability to integrate your system into theirs. Unless you are doing a lot of business with your shipping carrier, they probably won’t mention the fact that the offer it. Your best bet is to ask your FedEx/UPS representative to point you in the right direction.

Both FedEx and UPS offer a few different ways to set up the integration. The best way to integrate your system varies from system to system, development manpower, and what you expect from it.

CSV Import/Export

The simplest way to get information back and forth betweens the two systems is by importing a Comma Separated Values (CSV) text file with all your shipment information into the shipping program. Once you process your shipments you can export another CSV file with the tracking numbers back into your system.

Direct ODBC Connection

This option is more advanced and will require a higher technical skill set, but offers a much better user experience and can be fully automated.

You will need to provide UPS/FedEx with a SELECT query to pull the order information from your database. The shipping user will be asked to input an order I’d number which will then run this query and import the shipment data into the shipping program. After it creates a shipping label, it will run an UPDATE/INSERT query which you will also need to provide so it can write the tracking number back into your system.

Now What?

Talk to your shipping carrier and let them help you decide what will work best for you. In some cases they may offer a completely different solution.

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