Website Integration
With our Website API (Application Programming Interface), you can seamlessly integrate your existing website, e-commerce system or back office software into Despatch Bay saving you both time and money. Website integration will enable your site to automatically create Despatch Bay labels as part of your checkout process, validate addresses and postcodes and we can even provide you with a realtime list of available delivery options per postcode with costs, ensuring that your customers always choose a valid delivery option based on their delivery address. With further integration you can even make use of our tracking data within your website.
Your customer buys products from your site, & chooses a delivery method.
When you log into your account their label is waiting for you. All you need to do is print!
Your site integrates directly into Despatch Bay, transmitting your customers address & shipping preferences straight into your account.
However tightly you choose to integrate your website into Despatch Bay, we are here to assist your developers in the process, you can be confident that your labels will be automatically created for you in real-time, no data input necessary. All you'll need to do is print them.
Technical Overview
To access and manage your Despatch Bay account using the Despatch Bay API, you build a client application that connects to one or more of the provided web services. While each service can be used independently, most real-world scenarios (such as shipping parcels) require a client application to use multiple services.
The core messaging technology for the Despatch Bay API is Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which is an XML- and HTTP-based protocol with wide support in the industry. The Despatch Bay API uses document/literal style SOAP 1.1. The WebServices are secured by means of HTTP Basic Authentication.
The Despatch Bay API includes the following Web Services:
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Addressing
Allows you to accurately verify addresses which can subsequently be fed into the Shipping service to create labels. Each address is uniquely identified by an AddressKey
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Shipping
Lets you look up available services at a given postcode, query the status of shipments, and add new labels to the print queue
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Tracking
Returns tracking data for a parcel (Specified by parcel tracking number)
To use the Despatch Bay API, write a client program in a language of your choice (such as Java, Perl, Python, C, C++, PHP, .NET). Write your client program to send a request to one of the Despatch Bay Web Services, such as Addressing or Shipping. The relevant service will process the request and send back a response, which your client program needs to parse. Since the Despatch Bay API is a set of web services, there is nothing that you need to install related to the Despatch Bay API. The only software you need to install to use the Despatch Bay API is the software for the language and toolkit that you will be using to write your client programs. For example, if you intend to write your client programs in Java, you will need to install Java and also a SOAP toolkit such as Axis. Many languages including PHP and .NET have built in support for consuming SOAP web services.
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And change the way you manage your shipping today!