There are over 275,000 couriers available to choose from when you’re selecting your order delivery partners, making it impossible for order management software (OMS) to be able to offer pre-built connections to them all.
Your choice of delivery partners can vary depending on many factors such as the type of goods you ship and whether you deliver direct to consumer (DTC) or to another stage of the supply chain.
Selecting your courier delivery partners
As consumers and your customers continually expect a more seamless customer experience when they place an order with you, your chosen delivery partners are an increasingly crucial part of the order fulfilment process.
As a fulfilment business owner, there is a lot to consider when you select your couriers - some of the important aspects could be:
- Warehouse/storage options
- Delivery region i.e. Nationwide or Worldwide
- Speed of despatch
- Delivery timeframe options
- Tracking data and customer communications
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
It’s possible that a single courier cannot offer everything you require; therefore, you choose to partner with multiple. Having a cohort of delivery partners can give you greater flexibility, for example if one courier cannot accommodate your shipment, you have an alternative method of delivery to ensure customer satisfaction. For ecommerce sales, it can give the customer more autonomy to select a shipping option that suits their budget and timescales.
If you already use an order management system, your choice of couriers should not be limited by your OMS’s pre-built integrations; your priority should always be to meet your customers’ expectations.
Benefits of connecting your couriers to your order management system
An order management system should offer a streamlined and automated process of the entire order fulfilment process and this includes being able to manage all shipments from one place.
Inform courier that an order needs to be shipped
Your OMS should integrate with courier platforms, allowing automated data communications, such as sending delivery information to the shipping courier. This automated process will reduce manual data entry errors such as duplicated shipping requests. Some systems will also allow specific rules and criteria to be set to ensure the most cost-effective courier is chosen to complete the delivery.
Generate shipping labels
Creating shipping labels can be a time consuming and manual task. An OMS which is integrated with your courier platforms can simplify this task by automatically creating and sending shipping labels to print, removing the risk of duplication and freeing up your time.
Tracking information
Your courier connections on your OMS can automatically collect and store tracking information for each shipment, so you can stay up-to-date with where all of your deliveries are at any time.
If you’re an ecommerce retailer with your OMS also connected to your marketplaces such as eBay or your shopping cart software such as Shopify, you can keep your customers automatically updated with their shipment tracking information without the need to manually allocate tracking numbers to orders or send notifications to the customer.
How to connect couriers to your order management system
Pre-built courier connections are the simplest way to connect your shipping partners to your order management system, but as there are so many couriers not serviced by pre-built API connections; how do you connect to the others?
For Mintsoft, this is done via the Courier API Connector, offering unlimited custom courier integrations.
The Courier API Connector is where you can develop your own shipping (courier) integrations into Mintsoft. This applies to both Retailers and Wholesalers, but also couriers who want to have connections into Mintsoft.
For Retailers and Wholesalers
All you need to do is connect the courier API through our portal and automate generation of shipments through Mintsoft just like you would for any of the other connections.
We review all connections built through the portal, to ensure they meet the required standards. Assuming they do, we’ll then publish them to your connection page. Once live, if you have any issues then you can speak to our support team just like you would for any other issue with Mintsoft.
If you don’t have the technical skills in house to build and maintain, again, we’ve got you covered. You can use our in house development services team who will be more than happy to discuss your requirements and provide you with a quote for building and maintaining the connection.
For Couriers
For couriers who want to be able to promote themselves as being integrated with Mintsoft, we’ve thought of you too. Whether you’re a courier or multi-carrier shipping provider; you can build connections to Mintsoft using the same Courier API Connector portal.
Once the connection is confirmed as meeting required standards, you’ll become listed as a tile on our connect page within Mintsoft, so existing Mintsoft customers will all be able to see your service.
Connect to unlimited couriers with Mintsoft
If you’re a fulfilment business interested in Mintsoft and your shipping partner is not currently listed, then don’t worry – we can get you connected to them! Book a demo with one of our industry experts to discuss in detail, what you need from your new order management system and which partners you’ll need custom connections to.
