Shipping labels

The same box from Seattle to Atlanta is $6.80 one way and $11.40 another, and the only way anybody finds that out is by opening three carrier websites and typing the address into each. OrderDen asks all of them at once: open the order, pick the box, and USPS, UPS and FedEx come back priced side by side. Buy one and the label prints, the shipment is recorded, the postage lands against the order, and the parcel marks itself delivered when the carrier says it arrived.

Connecting

Postage is bought through EasyPost with your own key, charged to your own account — OrderDen is never in the middle of the money, and the rates you see are the rates your account gets.

1. Sign up at easypost.com and find your keys under Account → API Keys.
2. In OrderDen, go to Company Settings → Shipping.
3. Paste the test key (it starts EZTK) and save.

A test key buys labels that cost nothing and cannot be posted. Buy one, look at it, print it, make sure the address block reads the way you expect — then come back and paste the live key (EZAK) over it. The key is stored encrypted and never shown again; a form submitted with the box left blank keeps the key you already have rather than clearing it.

Two more settings sit under it:

• Post from — one of your own saved addresses. Left as Your company address, it uses the address on your Company Profile.
• Pre-select — whether the cheapest or the quickest service is ticked when the rates come back. It is a preference, not a rule: the whole list is always shown and you always choose.

Your boxes

Under the same page is Your boxes — the three or four things everything actually goes out in. Each one carries its inside dimensions and, importantly, its empty weight: the box on the scale with nothing in it.

Three are there from the start (a small box, a medium box and a padded envelope). Rename them, resize them, delete the ones you do not use, and add your own. One is always the default, and the default is what the ship screen starts on.

If you post in a carrier's own free packaging — USPS Flat Rate, UPS Express Box — put its name in Carrier packaging and the rate is quoted against that instead of your dimensions.

Weighing what goes in

A parcel quoted light is a parcel the carrier reweighs and bills the difference on, weeks later, on an invoice nobody reconciles. So the weight is worked out rather than guessed: what is going in the box, plus the box's own empty weight.

For that to work, the things you sell need weights. Put one on each item under Items → (an item) → Shipping: what one of them weighs, in grams. A variant can carry its own — a 16 oz candle is not an 8 oz candle — and the variant's weight wins.

An item nobody has weighed is not treated as weightless. Ask for rates on an order containing one and OrderDen refuses, by name, so you know which thing to put on the scale. You can always type a weight into the box on the ship screen to override the lot — which is what to do when you have actually weighed the finished parcel.

Buying a label

On any confirmed order, Buy a label:

1. Pick the box (the default is already chosen).
2. Leave the weight blank to work it out, or type one from the scale.
3. Add an insured value if the contents are worth covering.
4. Get rates.

Every service the carriers would sell comes back, cheapest first, with what each costs and how many days it says it will take. The cheapest and the quickest are badged. Pick one and Buy this label.

Buying it does five things you would otherwise do by hand and forget:

• the shipment is recorded, with its tracking number — so the order moves to Shipped, the stock leaves, and partial shipping still works exactly as it did;
• the postage lands on the order as a cost, so the margin you see is what you kept rather than what you charged;
• the label is kept as an attachment, so you can reprint it in a month when the carrier's own link has expired;
• and the buyer is emailed the tracking number, through your own Order shipped template.

The address

The address is read off the order — the same block that prints on the paperwork. When the carrier network has an opinion about it (a misspelled street, a missing ZIP+4, "this is a house not a loading bay") that opinion is shown, but nothing is rewritten: what the buyer typed is what stays on the order, because silently correcting an address is how a parcel ends up somewhere nobody expected. A residential address is flagged, because every carrier charges more to deliver to one.

Crossing a border

A parcel going to another country needs a customs declaration, and OrderDen builds it from the order itself: each line's description, what it sold for, what it weighs, its HS code and where it was made. Fill the last two in on the item (Items → (an item) → Shipping) once and every parcel after that declares itself correctly.

Printing forty at once

The Orders page carries a packing-table panel: everything confirmed, boxed and waiting to go out. Tick what is ready — everything is ticked to start with, because the usual answer is "all of it" — choose the box and whether you want the cheapest or the quickest, and Buy labels.

Each parcel is rated and bought on its own, so a heavy one and a light one each get the right price. Anything that cannot be shipped (no address, nothing left open, an item with no weight) is reported by name and the rest carry on — a batch that stops at the first problem is a batch nobody trusts.

Then Print them all: every label in one PDF, in the order they were bought, which is the order the parcels are stacked in. Print slips on the same panel does the same for the packing slips.

Either button says Printing… for a moment before the file opens. A stack of forty is put together in the background rather than in the page, so the app stays usable while it happens — and so does everybody else's, which is the real reason. If a label or a slip in the batch could not be produced, the file still comes out with everything else in it and a line underneath says how many were left behind; the missing one is on its own order, where you can print it by itself. The finished file stays available for a few hours, so a paper jam is a reprint rather than a re-run.

Not posting it?

Not everything goes in the post. On the ship screen, Not posting it? records a hand-over instead:

• Collected — set aside for pickup, with the date it is ready from. The buyer gets the Ready for collection email instead of a tracking number.
• Delivered by us — you are driving it round. Add the window ("Thursday, 9–1").
• Handed over — they took it with them.

None of these buy postage or invent a tracking number. They are recorded as shipments, so the order moves and the stock leaves exactly as it would.

Where is it?

Every bought label is tracked. When the carrier says a parcel arrived, the shipment moves to Delivered, the date is the carrier's own scan time rather than the moment the message reached us, the buyer gets the Order delivered email if you have that switched on, and you get a notification.

Only delivery changes anything. The dozen scans in between are the carrier's business, and a status that flickers through six values teaches nobody anything. A carrier that reports the same delivery twice — and they do — sends one email, not two.

Bought the wrong label

Refund label on the shipment asks the carrier for the postage back. Two things to know:

• every carrier takes days to decide, and most refuse a label that has already been scanned;
• so the postage stays on the order until a refund actually lands. Removing it on the strength of a request would flatter the margin of every parcel anybody changed their mind about.

A parcel already delivered cannot be refunded at all.

Emails to the buyer

Three templates, all editable under Company Settings → Email templates:

• Order shipped — sent when a label is bought. On by default.
• Ready for collection — sent when an order is set aside for pickup.
• Order delivered — sent when the carrier says it arrived. Off by default.

Which of them go out automatically is set under Company Settings → Sales defaults. All three can use {{shipment.summary}} (the carrier and tracking numbers, one per line, as links where the carrier has a tracking URL), {{shipment.trackingUrl}} and {{shipment.readyAt}}.

Through the API

Everything above is on the API: rate an order, buy a label, buy a batch, fetch a label PDF, void one, manage your boxes and validate an address. See the public API reference for the endpoints.