I love Shippo as a product and even more so as an example of startups solving unsexy problems with technology.<p>Payments before Stripe and Square were a pain in the ass. Shipping is a similar backbone to the economy that, for businesses, just sucked.<p>Building one universal shipping API and taking advantage of carrier bulk discounts even for the smallest businesses makes a much more demonstrable impact than a chat bot.<p>Good on them. Also amazing blog name (Get Put Post.)
I had the pleasure of getting to meet the Shippo team recently. I have to say, I was incredibly impressed. Everyone I met there was incredible: down to earth, really nice, highly motivated. I'm sure this company / team will go really far and do really great things. The two founders I spoke with seemed like genuine, great people. They have a really strong vision =)<p>I'm also a huge fan of the way Shippo's API service works, and the way they price their product. They're one of the few developer companies charging really fair prices for their service, and pricing is straight forward, and encourages usage. None of that enterprise BS that everyone is so eager to provide now-a-days.<p>I hope to use them in a future project someday =)
Is Shippo comparable to easypost? What are the differences/benefits? Seems like Shippo is more for small businesses and offers a richer interface for managing things without having to first integrate the API? Easypost seems more directed at developers, but they also seems like they are hiring a lot of ux people so I would assume they are building their own management interfaces aswell. Just wondering if both serve the same use cases. I will be looking at integrating something like this into a product primarily for shipping label creation and I am curious how the two services differ.
Shippo is great, we use it from our Weebly-based site. Between Shippo, Stripe and Square we've got pretty much what we need to run billing and shipping. Thank you, interwebs!
I'm sure this is not the intended use case, but considering the trouble I've had trying to use UPS/Fedex/USPS to print shipping labels for my personal use (many of the websites suck), it'd be great to see a desktop app that used this API to find the lowest cost service, print you a label for it, and track your shipment.
Looks like they offer free tracking api even if you don't buy shipping through them, which is interesting: <a href="https://goshippo.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://goshippo.com/pricing/</a>
Thanks for this article. I'm interested in the way you marketed your product to developers in early daus. What problems did you face and how fast did you grow in the first year? I'm currently looking for kind of a benchmark to compare if our API-first platform is on a good track.
I like the data science angle where they're using their large number of deliveries to make predictions for customers on when packages will arrive depending on carrier, route, day/time. Would be nice for a future blog post to show some stats on how accurate their predictions are.