Automate your business with Freight Club API Suite

After years of planning and countless, sleepless nights contemplating how to break even, your company is now at a stage where the sales are consistent and growing. You’re generating orders at a neck-break pace, your financials are in the green, and you’re pushing over 100 shipments a week. All the hard work has paid off and 2023 will be the year of expansion.

While you now find yourself profitable and growing, a host of new concerns start to crop up daily:

How many hours per week does your team spend generating shipments and checking rates?
How many hires will you need to keep up with the increased volume of orders? How do you prevent manual entry errors by your team?

How many separate platforms will you need to juggle and manage to keep the well-greased cogs of your company turning? Who gets access to each one? And most importantly, how do these platforms communicate with one another?

If you find yourself thinking about how to reduce manual work and simplify these issues, and you have the will and the financial means to upgrade your company’s infrastructure, then you are ready for an API Integration.

What is an API?

In laymen’s terms, an API (Application Programming Interface) allows two applications to exchange information. Think of it as a language between two systems that you’re currently using to run your business. This communication is typically broken down into two parts – a call and a response.

A good example of an API in action is the Freight Club App itself! When you submit your shipment details and click on ‘Get Rate’, Freight Club will send an API CALL containing all the information you’ve entered to every carrier in our network. Each carrier will send back their shipping rate in an API RESPONSE:

While using a platform like Freight Club is very easy, you may find that it is time-consuming to quote and book every shipment individually when you’re moving over 100 orders per day. By utilizing our API Integration, you can automate this process entirely.

What can I do with Freight Club’s API Suite?

Once you are integrated with our system, you will be able to access the following features automatically without logging into your account:

Quote and book shipments
Download Labels and Bills of Lading
Obtain Shipment Tracking Updates
Submit Cancellations

Export order details/statuses in bulk

This is just the starting point, since how you use these features within your existing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system is entirely up to you!

Example #1

If you are working with multiple carrier partners, you can integrate via API with every one of them (Freight Club Included). Every time you have a new shipment, your ERP System can ‘ping’ each carrier using an API CALL and have all of them return their rates to you in an API RESPONSE. This will prevent you from having to log-in to multiple portals when you’re shopping for the best rates possible, and you can book them all from the same place.

Example #2

If you want to provide your customers with a ‘live’ shipping quote at the checkout page of your website, you can integrate with Freight Club via API, and we’ll provide the quote to your customer within seconds.

How do API integrations work?

If you’ve read this piece so far and you’ve thought, “Great! Let’s wave a wand and automate EVERYTHING,” then you may need to slow down. Before we begin the integration, you’ll need to be utilizing an ERP System that can generate API Calls to our system.

The next step is to obtain an API Token, which effectively acts as a ‘password’ that will allow you to access our system via API. You can request this through your Freight Club account, and you will need to be on credit terms for us to proceed with approval.

Once the token is approved, you will need to have a web developer set up the integration between our two systems. While our API is considered quite easy to implement by industry standards, APIs themselves are highly technical and usually require an expert to set up successfully.

Your web developer can access our API support and set-up documentation at the following link: https://api.freightclub.com/ApiDoc/index

Should there be any difficulties during the integration process, our development team (tech@freightclub.com) is available to support wherever needed!

In Conclusion

If your company is generating more orders than your team can keep up with, and you find yourself throwing too many resources to manage your day-to-day bookings via manual processes, then API Integration is the final frontier that you should be working towards.

If you’re ready to take those next steps, feel free to book a session with one of our shipping experts. We’re here to help!

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