Comment by tbran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tbran | Hacker News Reader

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I'm launching a marketplace within a month or so for custom machining and fabrication. Vendors want instantaneous quotes and labels. I'll probably be integrating with EasyPost to start. Here are some thoughts:

I need an API so a vendor can print labels from my site. I want one-click shipping so that they get 1) a label 2) billed 3) pickup. Speed is important to my vendors. Most of them bill hourly and think of their time that way so anything that reduces time per job is a big deal.

My flow looks like:

Customer enters specs and shipping info for a price quote -> Vendor responds with a quote including shipping

If all goes well, I'll also do instantaneous pricing for certain machining processes. Unless I missed something in the docs, EasyPost apparently does not do quotes based solely on zip/dimensions/weight and I never got a response from support when I asked. For me, this means that to get a shipping quote, customers also need to enter at least an "address_line1". There may be a business/technical reason for this, but I'm worried that having to enter that additional piece of personally-identifying info on my site will be a dealbreaker for first-time customers while I'm starting up.

For my use case, I'd like to see Stripe Connect functionality for shipping: vendors sign up for shipping through OAuth and then I interact with the shipping service on behalf of each vendor. On EasyPost, it appears that a UPS/Fedex/USPS/whatever account is tied to the EasyPost account. It was suggested that I bill vendors for shipping and go through my own carrier accounts, but this seems messy.

If you could address some concerns for marketplaces in the future, I'd be pretty happy.

Hi tbran, thanks for leaving a comment. Here's my take on your concerns: Easypost is a really great service. They were in YC and I think they are a great choice for the flow you mentioned. We're quite different from them (while we're still addressing the same problem).

The address_line 1 is not necessary to get an accurate quote. However, it is necessary to generate a label that you'll need for sending the package. You'll have to be careful to enter the correct address. FedEx charges extra afterwards for address corrections. Our goal was to build an API that allows you to get accurate quotes without having to enter a lot of data. However for the final label purchase the exact address will be necessary.

UPS/FedEx etc. don't allow you to pass on your account to people that are not directly connected with your business. I assume that is what you meant by "messy." If you still want to do that stripe connect is certainly a good choice. This is exactly what we're working on - to get contracts with courier services to eliminate this problem.

About the flow that we had envisioned for our service: customers choose the product they want to buy -> tell us in which country they live -> we show them all available courier services -> they chose the servicelevel that suits their needs best (fastest, cheapest, whatever) -> check out -> the label is directly sent to the vendor -> vendor sticks it on the package -> brings it to the post office/gets pickup (vendor can specify if only pickups are allowed & which day is best for pick up) -> done (all through API)

Just email me at laura(at)goshippo.com if you have any more questions. Happy to help out.

Regarding the "messy account passing", I'd just like to be able to interact with a vendor's own UPS account with minimal setup from my vendor. Thanks for the info! It clears some things up.

I don't know a service that offers multiple courier services and allows multiple accounts... If you want you can integrate the API of one courier service, such as UPS, and offer access with multiple accounts. Or you can use Easypost and have access to multiple courier services with one single account. I'm sorry that I couldn't be more helpful. Good luck!

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