Shipping software is a single tool through which an online seller ships its orders through many courier companies: it chooses the courier for each parcel, prints the shipping label and books the pickup. It is also called multi-carrier shipping software, or a shipping aggregator. With it, the seller does not need a separate account and website for each courier.
Why use several couriers? Because no one courier is best everywhere. One may deliver fastest to big cities. Another may reach more small towns and more pin codes. A third may be cheapest for heavy parcels. And couriers differ in how often their cash-on-delivery parcels are refused at the door. A refused parcel goes back to the seller, which is called RTO, as the page on cash on delivery and RTO explains.
The software connects to each courier through an API, a set of rules through which one program sends requests to another and receives answers. Through it, the shipping software asks each courier for a rate and books the shipment. It receives the airway bill number, the courier's tracking number for the parcel. Later, it receives every tracking update.
Say a skincare brand in Jaipur sells 800 orders a day on its own website, built on an e-commerce platform. Each paid order reaches the shipping software from the brand's order management system (OMS). The brand has set three rules. Prepaid orders to metro cities go with the cheapest courier that delivers in two days. Cash-on-delivery orders go with the courier that has the lowest return rate in that pin code. Parcels over 5 kilograms go by road, not by air. An order for ₹1,250 of creams to Bhubaneswar, paid by cash on delivery, goes to the courier whose return rate there is 9%, rather than one whose rate is 17%. The software prints the label with that courier's barcode. It books one pickup at 4 p.m. with each courier that has parcels that day. Each courier collects its parcels and carries them into its express courier network.
After that, the software follows every parcel. It reads each courier's tracking updates and shows them to the customer through order tracking and returns software. It checks each courier's bill against the agreed rate. And it tracks the cash that each courier has collected at the door and must pay to the brand.
Two parts of shipping software have their own pages. Delivery failure prediction warns about orders that are likely to fail. Cross-border shipping handles parcels sent abroad, with their customs forms.