Use ShipperHQ with Order Management or Fulfillment Software

Overview

At ShipperHQ, we understand you have unique business processes that may benefit from the shipment details generated at checkout. Depending on your eCommerce platform, there are a number of ways to integrate the rich shipment info generated by ShipperHQ while producing shipping rates with your fulfillment processes.

Shipping Insights

Shipping Insights Example
Shipping Insights Example

The optimal way to integrate ShipperHQ with your Order Management or Fulfillment Software is our Shipping Insights functionality. Where available, this feature gives you extended shipment details regardless of the limitations of the eCommerce platform has for storing this information.

In addition to displaying shipment details out of the box with no coding required in supported eCommerce platform admin panels or within supported post-order software like ShipStation and agnoStack, you can also integrate directly by using our Insights API to pull this information into your fulfillment software.

Shipping Insights is available for certain ShipperHQ plans on:

  • Adobe Commerce (Magento 2)
  • BigCommerce
  • Shopify

If you’re using ShipperHQ on an eCommerce platform that does not currently support Shipping Insights, please contact us and if we add support for that platform in the future we’ll let you know.

Learn more about Shipping Insights →

General Recommendations

In general, we recommend you use the shipping method field on an order to map or process your orders automatically. For example, the shipping description would be “USPS Priority Mail”, however the shipping method on the order is saved as “shqusps_priority”. This is more reliable and repeatable than using the shipping description field on an order.  The shipping description can be altered by translation on your site or any expected delivery dates you may include in your display. The shipping method will remain constant for this carrier and method, regardless of display differences.

Alternate Options

If you’re not using Shipping Insights, or on an eCommerce platform that does not yet support it, you’ll need to rely on the capabilities of the eCommerce platform itself to store and access shipment information. These capabilities vary by platform but are described generally below.

Magento 1

ShipperHQ sets the shipping method and shipping description on an order. It also saves additional information for each order in custom columns on the order table and order items table. You can access these values using direct calls e.g. $order->getData("liftgate_required") or by using the Magento Order API to extract.

You can view what is available by reviewing the order table sales_flat_order on your Magento installation – some common and useful columns are:

  • carrier_id
  • carrier_type
  • dispatch_date
  • shq_delivery_comments
  • delivery_date
  • destination_type
  • carriergroup_shipping_htm
  • liftgate_required
  • notify_required
  • inside_delivery
  • freight_quote_id
  • customer_carrier
  • customer_carrier_ph
  • customer_carrier_account
  • pickup_location
  • pickup_location_id
  • time_slot
  • pickup_latitude
  • pickup_longitude
  • limited_delivery
Note: If this is a split or merged rate order – the above columns won’t be populated, and all of the data will be housed in the column carriergroup_shipping_details in JSON format. This contains an array with one entry per carrier group (i.e. one per origin or shipment).

Further Information

Magento 2

Basic shipping information is stored by Magento in the standard order tables:

  • sales_order – use the order ID (called increment_id on this table) to extract order detail
    • shipping_method – The carrier and method code for shipping
    • shipping_description – The displayed carrier and shipping method chosen

Additional detail is stored in separate ShipperHQ tables – there are a lot but the ones of interest are:

  • shipperhq_order_detail – use the order ID to extract order detail. Information includes
    • dispatch_date
    • delivery_date
    • destination_type i.e residential/commercial
    • liftgate_required
    • notify_required i.e. appointment required
    • inside_delivery
    • time_slot
    • address_valid
    • limited_delivery i.e. restricted delivery
    • carriergroup_detail – a JSON data structure which will contain the origins/warehouses and selected shipping methods for the order
  • shipperhq_order_item_detail – use the order Item ID to extract detail for each item
    • carrier_group i.e. the origin or group of this order item
    • carrier_group_shipping i.e. the shipping method for the order item
  • shipperhq_order_packages – use order ID, includes shipment information
    • package_name
    • carrier_code
    • dimensions of length, width and height
    • weight
    • declared_value

You can extract directly from these tables – we have a helper class ShipperHQ\Shipper\Helper\CarrierGroup , the following function will return all order detail for an order: getOrderCarrierGroupInfo($orderId).

Note: If using ShipperHQ Enhanced Checkout, the only information stored in Magento is the information on the sales_order table described above. For any additional information, you’ll need to use Shipping Insights to retrieve any shipment information beyond the basic information stored on the standard Magento order tables.

Further Information

BigCommerce

BigCommerce stores limited shipment information with orders. This is limited to shipping price, carrier name, method name (which includes delivery date or duties & tax information if enabled), and method code.

Carrier Name and Method Name are both viewable on orders in the BigCommerce Admin Panel. Method Code is only available via the BigCommerce Orders API. More information

Shopify

Shopify stores very limited shipment information. This includes shipping price, carrier name, method name (which includes delivery date or duties & tax information if enabled), and method code.

This information is available via the Retrieve a specific order method of the Shopify Admin API Orders endpoint.

Note: While most platforms store the standard ShipperHQ Method Code format (shqcarriercode_methodcode e.g. “shqups1_gnd” for a carrier with carrier code “ups1” and a method with method code “gnd”), Shopify stores the carrier name instead of the carrier code (e.g. “UPS_Shipping_gnd” for a carrier named “UPS Shipping”). More info on Carrier and Method Codes

Support for UPS Access Point

  • To process orders placed with a UPS Access Point carrier, you can extract the Location ID from the shipping method in Magento (1 & 2). The shipping method can be viewed by exporting the orders to CSV or using your custom integration as detailed above.
  • The format of the shipping method is <carrier>_<method>_<locationId> e.g. shqupsaccess_GND_U85431561

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