Courier integration for online stores: waybill (AWB), tracking, cash on delivery

At a few orders a day, you copy the address into your courier account and print the label. At a few dozen, someone does nothing else all morning, and the typing mistakes come back as undelivered parcels. A courier integration connects your store directly to the couriers’ systems: the transport document, the waybill (AWB), is generated from the order, and the parcel’s status comes back into the store by itself.

The part the buyer sees matters just as much: many of the calls an online store gets are variations on the question “where is my order?” A message sent at the right time answers before the question is asked.

What gets complicated when you work with two or three couriers

Stores quickly end up with several couriers: one is better with small parcels, another with heavy goods, another has parcel lockers. Each has its own account, its own label format, its own list of localities and its own way of naming a parcel’s statuses.

Addresses are the usual source of trouble. The buyer writes the locality the way they know it, and the courier wants it from its own reference list; within the same county there can be villages with the same name. If the matching only happens when the AWB is generated, the error shows up at packing, with the parcel in hand.

Then there is the money. With cash on delivery, the courier collects from the recipient and transfers the accumulated amounts to you, with a remittance statement. Without records per parcel, you do not know whether every delivered order has also been settled.

From order to parcel handed over: what the integration does

You tell us the selection rules in words, and we turn them into a table you can change without a programmer: the first rule that matches wins, and the last one is the default courier.

An example: a WooCommerce store with products ranging from small accessories to bulky parts, working with three courier companies. An order’s journey:

• Address validation: right at checkout, the locality and the county are chosen from lists, and for locker delivery the buyer picks the point on the map.
• Courier selection: by actual and volumetric weight, area, cash on delivery and the option the buyer chose.
• AWB generation: from a button or automatically, when the order status changes; the label comes out in the printer’s format.
• Tracking: the parcel status is read periodically or received from the courier and translated into a few statuses of the store’s own.
• Messages to the buyer: an email or SMS at handover to the courier, when the parcel is out for delivery and after a failed delivery.

Cash-on-delivery records and the path of a return

For every cash-on-delivery parcel we keep three pieces of information: the amount to collect, the delivery status and the settlement status. The courier’s remittance statements are imported and each line is matched to the AWB and to the order. What remains is a short list: parcels delivered but still not settled once the deadline in the contract has passed.

A return has two parts. Logistics: the buyer fills in a request, receives a return AWB, and the parcel is tracked all the way to the warehouse. Stock management: at goods-in, a colleague notes the product’s condition, stock is updated, and the refund follows the process agreed with your accountant.

The consumer’s right of withdrawal, the deadlines and who bears the transport cost are things you check with your lawyer and against the requirements of ANPC, the consumer protection authority; we build the workflow around the returns policy you adopt.

Courier integration through an API or an existing plugin

The large courier companies in Romania (FAN Courier, Sameday, Cargus, DPD, GLS) offer APIs, that is, interfaces through which a program requests the generation of an AWB or the status of a parcel. For WooCommerce there are also plugins from couriers or from aggregators, sufficient for basic needs. We write custom code when your rules, multiple warehouses or the link to your stock management software do not fit into a plugin.

When we build the link, we work on the couriers’ test accounts, where they exist, then with real shipments to our own addresses, including one with cash on delivery and one that is returned.

• The audit: couriers, contracts, service types, warehouses, daily volume.
• The rules: the selection table and the store’s own statuses.
• The reference lists: matching localities between the store and each courier.
• The trial: a working day followed alongside the packing team.

Common mistakes with delivery notifications and costs

Too many messages do as much harm as too few. Couriers send SMS messages of their own, so we settle who announces what. An SMS has a cost per message, so we keep it for the moments that call for action; the rest goes by email.

On costs, the classic surprise is volumetric weight: the courier charges by whichever is greater, the actual weight or the one calculated from the dimensions. If products do not have their dimensions filled in, the rules choose wrongly, and the delivery charge in the basket does not cover the courier’s invoice.

To know whether the integration is doing its job, track the time from order to parcel handover, the AWBs corrected by hand, the parcels that come back and the questions about order status.

This is a typical project description: it shows how we usually approach this kind of work and does not present a project carried out for a particular client. Every real project starts from your company’s situation, and the stages, timescales and price are agreed after the initial discussion.