Advanced Rating Features
ShipEngine's Rate Shopping feature has many facets and can provide additonal utility beyond getting the quoted cost for a shipment. This article covers the Retail Rates and Quick Rates features.
Retail Rates
By default, ShipEngine will return the same rate that you'd see if you signed into your carrier account on their website and tried to ship a package. However, there are plenty of use cases where it can be valuable to see the rate available if you were to go to the carrier's retail location and purchase postage. The Retail Rates feature allows those rates to be visible from ShipEngine.
Some things to note:
- If ShipEngine does not support retail rates for the carrier you are querying, we will return a 0 amount.
- The response object
requested_comparison_amount
is a sum of the carrier costs for the shipment. It should be compared against the sum ofshipping_amount
,confirmation_amount
andother_amount
(insurance_amount
will only be a factor if you choose carrier insurance). - This feature is only available at the
/v1/rates
and/v1/labels
endpoints when creating rates or labels with a shipment.
Example Request & Response
You can also pass the comparison_rate_type
in the shipment when creating a label!
Response
Quick Rates
We've found that when getting rates just in time to purchase a label, milliseconds matter. That's why we've developed a way to combine the speed of the Rate Estimate endpoint and the detail of the /v1/rates
endpoint to offer you a fast and fully-featured way to retrieve rates.
Quick Rates saves time by minimizing the information ShipEngine saves about your request. That means you won't be able to use operations like Create Label from Rate or Retrieve Shipment Rates. You will, however, be able to rate international and multi-package shipments with advanced options. You can even use Quick Rates with Retail Rates!
Example Request & Response
Response