Test and Visualize ShipEngine APIs Using Our Postman Collections

When businesses invest in a new product or application, they typically want to know exactly what they’re getting and how it will help business, before they buy. With API products, this proof of concept is more complex than just kicking the tires. APIs can require weeks, sometimes months, of development in order to test all the endpoints.

But, what if there was a way to mockup and test ShipEngine’s APIs without first needing to build-out your integration? This is where Postman comes in. 

Postman is a unique, free, cross-platform application that allows you to simulate and visualize API requests. It not only allows you to design and mock up your APIs, but also to debug, test, document, monitor, and publish. Its unique visualizations also enable you to easily digest data that would otherwise be returned as hundreds of lines of JSON. 

In an effort to further enhance our on-boarding experience, we’ve created two Postman Collections that aim to help developers — and non-developers — better understand and navigate our various shipping APIs. 

From our documentation, you can now find the following Postman collections:

• ShipEngine Walkthrough
• ShipEngine Reference 

The Walkthrough collection will guide you step-by-step through the most popular ShipEngine features, and allow you to easily follow along as you experiment with API requests. For anyone interested in exploring ShipEngine’s features one-by-one, or seeing an exhaustive list of the calls you can make to our API, we’ve also created a Reference collection. 

With these Postman collections, you’ll learn how to use your sandbox API key to create and download shipping labels, calculate shipping costs, compare carrier rates, track packages in real-time or on-demand, and parse and validate global mailing addresses.

We encourage you to watch our demonstration, below, on how to use our Walkthrough collection. This video allows you to quickly start discovering the many ways you can optimize your shipping workflow with ShipEngine.

If you’d prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve also created specific documentation that will guide you through the collection. It’s important to note that, when using the Walkthrough collection, you will need to run each API request in order to avoid errors.

We’re confident that this tool will help you explore and better understand how to integrate with our full-featured shipping API — and how to solve shipping for your business. If you have questions about how to get started with a free API key, or about our Postman collections, we encourage you to reach out to our sales or support team.