Confirm serviceability, compare rates and print Ecom shipping labels from your order system, then let your customers follow the shipment through Ecom tracking.
Ecom Express concentrates on North India, which makes serviceability predictable in the regions it serves and worth handling carefully everywhere else. The integration makes that explicit: a rate request tells you whether Ecom will take a shipment to a pin code and what it costs, before the order is confirmed. Bookings, labels, tracking and cancellations then follow the same path for every order.
The Ecom Shipping API handles rate checks, booking, labels, tracking and pickups. What your team stops doing is retyping them.
The booking is created from the order itself, so the address, pin code and weight are used exactly once. Ecom returns the AWB and the label, which prints on the paper your printers already take. Where a rate was estimated earlier in checkout, the booked consignment is what the warehouse sees.
A booking can be cancelled from the same screen while it is still open, whether the customer changed their mind or the order turned out to be incomplete. The cancellation reference stays on the order, so a disputed delivery later has an answer attached to it.
Ecom tracking data is pulled into Softpal so your customers get the current status from your own pages. Your support team sees the same scan history, which matters most in the regions where a customer is most likely to query a shipment before it has moved.
Where Ecom does not push an update, the status is requested again after a set interval. The setting is easy to change later, but it is worth starting sensibly: aggressive polling across every open consignment costs more than it tells you.
Credentials, rate cards and pickup locations are configured per Ecom Express account, so each seller or warehouse is billed against its own contract. Because Ecom's coverage is regional, keeping accounts and rate cards distinct also stops a rate meant for one territory being applied to another.
Pickup requests and manifests are generated from the same view as the orders they cover, and a booking can still be placed by hand for anything unusual. Serviceability is checked before the label is produced, so a pin code Ecom cannot serve is caught while the order can still be changed.
The fetch rate is the interval between calls to the Ecom API. Five minutes is suitable for a busy dispatch queue, an hour for orders that ship in batches. It can also be triggered by an event such as a new order or a status change instead of running on a timer.
The Ecom API accepts pickup requests, so a batch of parcels ready at a given address can be flagged for collection from your system rather than by telephone. The request remains attached to the consignments it covers, which removes any question about what was included.
The estimated delivery date is returned after pickup. Distance, the service selected and the time taken to process the order all contribute, so the figure your customer sees becomes more dependable once the parcel has actually been collected.
Pin code serviceability and carrier coverage arrive with the rate. For a carrier with a regional footprint that matters more than it would for a national one, because the honest answer to an order outside the network is to route it to a different carrier rather than book it and hope.
Ecom Express charges recorded in accounts payable are compared with the carrier's statements, transaction by transaction. Drawing the data in through the API rather than retyping a bill is what makes weight discrepancies and surcharge lines visible while they can still be queried.
More than one Ecom Express account can be active, chosen by rule. Weight slabs are the common approach, one account for consignments under 5 kg and another for anything heavier, and accounts can also be split by region with a default account for every location that matches no specific rule.
