RocketShipIt will save you a ton of time, money, and headaches. And, it won't cost you more as your business grows.
You will spend weeks combing through developer API PDFs trying to integrate directly with the shipping carriers. Yes, many of the carriers still use PDFs for their documentation.
A lot of the information in their docs has changed over the years and they're difficult to follow. Their API docs contain mistakes and are missing vital information. Some of the API errors you will come across have no clear meaning.
And if you need to integrate with multiple shipping carriers you get to do the whole process all over again! With RocketShipIt, you don't have to open a single PDF or guess what the request will look like to create that complicated "signature-required--cash-on-delivery--shipment--with--dry-ice". Our documentation has examples for even the most complicated shipping scenarios that your business will ever need.
Carriers change their APIs. With us you don't need to read through carrier change logs or ever update your code. RocketShipIt makes the changes and keeps the same API for you (when possible). When the carrier updates RocketShipIt updates so you won't need to change a thing.
Here is a simple example:
The UPS API returns a gif image in landscape orientation when an image based shipping label is requested. FedEx doesn't support gif images at all. Their API returns a png label in portrait mode. Sure you can rotate and convert the image but this is one less thing you will need to worry about with RocketShipIt as you can usually use the same API request and simply swap out the carrier name. This is just one of many examples of how RocketShipIt abstracts away these API inconsistencies.
Our competitors charge per label. We don't think that's fair to you. RocketShipIt doesn't charge you extra just because your sales went up and you need to create more shipping labels.
RocketShipIt charges a low monthly fee for unlimited shipping. We don't have price tiers. You aren't charged per label. And, if your business ships 1,000 packages a day we don't think you should pay $0.05/label * 1,000 * 30 = $1,500/month. This is the pricing model you will find with other services. Some even charge you each time you track a package!
You can use RocketShipIt as a service in the cloud. But, we encourage you to self-host it.
Some companies offer self-hosting/on-premise solutions but they are often reserved for big enterprises with big bucks. We flip this around. There's no need to call for a quote because every RocketShipIt customer can self-host.
This means:
As the founder, I still personally respond to most of the support requests. As a result, I know many of our customers by name. I'm proud of what RocketShipIt has become and I'm excited to get to know you and your needs.
It may take us some time to dig into your support request but I can promise that you will get a detailed response from a shipping API expert. We don't outsource our support. Your questions will be answered by an experienced software developer that has extensive knowledge of shipping APIs.
We can sometimes help with even your general shipping questions as we've been working in the shipping industry and with these APIs for over 14 years.
Under the hood RocketShipIt creates API requests to the shipping carriers. Often these requests are XML/SOAP (yuck). It then sends the request to the carrier. When the carrier responds RocketShipIt extracts the data and responds to your application with a consistent JSON response.
We even do this across carriers. As an example some carriers allow you to create a multi-package shipment in a single request while others require you to create a separate request for each package.
To make this consistent RocketShipIt allows you to make a single request for all carriers. When a carrier requires a separate request for each label in a multi-package shipment RocketShipIt will simultaneously send out the requests to make it happen. This is especially useful for programming languages without good support for concurrency.
RocketShipIt is a subscription service that gives you complete access to our shipping API in the cloud. But, you can also download the full RocketShipIt application along with API clients for PHP, Node.js, Ruby, and Python. And of course, you get expert support to help you along the way.
RocketShipIt is written in Go. It's 138,304 lines of unit-tested quality code that you didn't have to write! It has zero dependencies and is easy to use. You can run it as an HTTP JSON API service or send JSON requests via stdin.
And we love hearing from you. Here's what others had to say.
I love RocketShip.It so far, it's so easy to use and so feature rich. Support has been incredible for it as well. Thanks a lot! -- Kevin Johnson
I have to tell you that RocketShipIt has already been an absolute lifesaver.... After so many bad experiences with "professionals" backed by millions of VC dollars, I was all too skeptical that a library written by someone for their parent's small business would be any different. Boy was I wrong. Thank-you so much, and I can't wait until I have an excuse to integrate USPS as well! -- Charles Zink
First, I love your product, it's saved me so much time. Your "about" page is right, who wants to read 500+ pages of documentation! -- Eric Cholis - Director of Web Technology, http://www.dacardworld.com
We've cut down fulfillment time to only a fraction of our old manual process, and shipment automation is a major part of that savings. -- Jay Littlefield
I wanted to thank you for releasing RocketShipIt. We've used it to ship hundreds of thousands of packages, and we've not run into a single issue with it. It's probably the most reliable software we've used over the last two years. -- Brett Farrow partswarehouse.com
