Les Jones

E-commerce > Automate Airborne Shipping

Airborne has a new program to take the drudgery out of creating airbills. If you ship packages Airborne, your shipping clerk has to go to the Airborne web site and key in all of the customer shipping and contact data. You already have that data in electronic format in your shopping cart. If only there were a way to get your computers to talk to Airborne's computers.

Now there's a way, and it couldn't be easier. You simply create a URL with all of the customer information. Click on the URL to send the data to Airborne's Web site. Airborne's Web site will prompt you for a username and password, then pull the data out of the URL and create the airbill. If you include the customer's email address Airborne will send the customer their tracking number. Here's an example:

https://www.wwexship.com/wwxchange/External.jsp?companyName=Database Development
Design&address1=5615 NW Central Drive&suiteDept=Suite
C107&city=Houston&state=TX&zip=77092&serviceType=GND

Ideally you would replace the spaces with %20 for proper URL encoding, though it works fine without them as long as you copy and paste the URL into your browser. You can also use a POST operation if you prefer using a form.

You might want to review your privacy policy to make sure that giving the email address to Airborne is kosher. Our privacy policy covers this: "We use the information you provide about yourself when placing an order to complete that order. We do not share this information with outside parties except to the extent necessary to complete that order. That would include payment verification services (currently CyberCash), anti-fraud services used by CyberCash, and shipping services such as FedEx and UPS."

Before implementing the system, I made an inquiry to our network security officer to make sure this was a secure way to pass customer data over the Internet. The URL begins with https, meaning that this is an SSL-encrypted exchange. SSL encrypts the data, as well as the URL, so snooping is impossible. The security officer signed off on it.

It took me about 30 minutes to re-program our shopping cart to include the URL in the emails we receive when a customer places an order. Every time the shipping clerk uses the system he'll save a couple of minutes of drudgery. Even if you ship just a few Airborne packages a day the programming time is worth it.

I checked Airborne's site and found a lot of information about their other interfaces (which are also very cool), but not this one. Here's a quick and dirty copy and paste of the instructions Airborne sent us:

www.wwexship.com

External Linkage

API

Version 1.1
September 30, 2003

SECTION 1 – External Access

External Request Documentation

The External request system has been provided to enable external customers to auto populate the
shipment preparation form. This is accomplished by sending the shipment request to the system
by data embedded in a URL request. The variable names and definitions are as follows. Optional
values are in red text.

companyName - Name of the company the shipment is being sent to
suiteDept - Suite number or department name of the receiving company
address1 - First address line for the receiving company
address2 - Second address line for the receiving company
city - City name for the receiving company
state - Two letter abbreviation for the receiving company
zip - Zip code for the receiving company
attn - Attention To
receiverPhone - Receiver’s telephone number
email - Recipients email address
notes - Notes you wish included on the airbill
sentBy - Name of sending entity
senderPhone - Sender’s telephone number
serviceType - Type of service being requested (valid values – GND, NAS, EXP, SDS)
shipmentReference - Free form shipment ref field

This request can be sent by either an HTTP GET or POST operation to the following URL:

https://www.wwexship.com/wwxchange/External.jsp

Example URL:

https://www.wwexship.com/wwxchange/External.jsp?companyName=Database Development
Design&address1=5615 NW Central Drive&suiteDept=Suite
C107&city=Houston&state=TX&zip=77092&serviceType=GND

Making this request will start the airbill generation process. You will still have to
authenticate yourself at the requested dialog, and click on Print Airbill when presented with
the create shipment page.

Rate Matrix Access API

The external rate matrix access has been provided for customers using a third party online
ordering or shopping cart system. It provides estimated costs for each of the 4 service levels,
in a comma-separated format. In order to retrieve rates, 4 pieces of information need to be
provided.

fromZip - Origin zip code
toZip - Destination zip code
weight - Package weight, for letter, use weight=0
acctNum - Account number requesting rates

This request can be sent by either an HTTP GET or POST operation to the following URL:

http://www.wwexship.com/rates/GetRates.jsp

Example URL:
http://www.wwexship.com/rates/GetRates.jsp?fromZip=77092toZip=60655&weight=0&acctNum=100880967

Making this request will return two lines of comma separated data. The first line is the
service levels, the second line is the corresponding pricing. For example

GND, NAS, SDS, EXP
$6.50, $12.25, $7.85, $14.00

SECTION 2 - Notifications

XML Shipment Notification

For customers that wish to receive automated notifications that a shipment has been generated,
we offer an XML notification API that enables our system to send an XML message to a URL
specified by the customer. This allows the customer to be sent information such as the airbill
number, shipment reference, and a cost estimate whenever a shipment is generated using their
account. The XML document is defined below.

Shipment Node Description 1 - * Required Size
Shipment/Airbill Airbill number of the generated shipment 1 Required 0-15 Text
Shipment/ShipmentReference Free-form shipment reference field entered by customer 1 Required
0-255 Text
Shipment/Estimate Rate and service estimate 1 Required 0-8 Numeric

EXAMPLE:

123456789
Customer 123 Order Number 456
10.55

This XML notification will be sent to a customer provided URL via an HTTP POST operation. The
URL that this data is sent to can reside on any web server within an organization that is
publicly accessible.

URL Shipment Notification

Another way to receive shipment notification is by URL. When a shipment is generated, our
system will make a request to a URL provided by the customer. This URL will have several
parameters

airbill - Airbill number of generated shipment
shipmentReference - Reference field of generated shipment
estimate - Estimated shipping costs

These parameters will be passed to a customer-provided URL to form a complete URL string that
resembles the following:

http://www.customersite.com/wwxchangelanding.asp?airbill=123456789&shipmentReference=00000&estimate=12.35

Posted by lesjones