Compare rates, book shipments and print labels through NETPARCEL from your order system, then give customers tracking from your own pages.
NETPARCEL gives sellers access to carrier services through a single connection, so the integration has two jobs. It has to carry a shipment end to end, and it has to keep the choice of service clear to whoever is dispatching. That means returning rates before the order is confirmed, booking the service that was chosen, printing the label for that specific service, and keeping the tracking that comes back attached to the order.
Rates, bookings, labels, cancellations, tracking and pickups, with the service you select recorded against the order.
The booking is created from the order, with the service you selected rather than a default, and the consignment reference comes back against the order. The label is generated from that booking, so it matches the service and the price the customer agreed to.
A booking can be cancelled from the same record while the consignment is still open, whether the order changed after labelling or a booking was created against the wrong address. The cancellation reference is kept with the order for later reference.
NETPARCEL tracking information is stored against the order in Softpal, so customers can check a shipment from your own site and your support team sees the same history. Scans from the carrier that took the parcel follow it through to delivery.
Where updates are not pushed, status is fetched again at a configured interval. We set that per carrier rather than as one global default, because the volume that suits a morning dispatch queue is not the volume a nightly batch produces.
Credentials, rate cards and service preferences are configured for the NETPARCEL accounts you hold. Each contract is applied only to the shipments it was negotiated for, so a rate agreed for one lane or weight band does not leak into another.
Ongoing shipment management is the part that decides whether an integration stays useful after launch. A booking can still be placed by hand for anything the standard flow does not cover, and the manual action stays recorded on the order, so the dispatch record stays complete even on the days when the system is not the one doing the work.
The fetch rate is the interval between calls your system makes to the NETPARCEL API. Five minutes suits a busy order book, an hour suits one that ships in batches, and a trigger such as a new order can be used instead of a fixed schedule.
NETPARCEL accepts pickup requests through its API, so a batch of parcels ready at a given address can be flagged for collection from your system. The request stays linked to the consignments it covers, which removes any question about what was in the collection.
The estimated delivery date is returned after pickup rather than at booking. Distance, the service selected and the time the order took to process all feed the estimate, so it becomes more dependable once the parcel is in the network.
Cross-border shipments carry the export documentation and customs brokerage the destination requires, arranged through the service the carrier belongs to. Service choice matters on an international order as much as price does, since duties and paperwork are tied to the lane.
NETPARCEL charges recorded in accounts payable are matched against the carrier's statements, transaction by transaction. Bringing the data in through the API is what makes a rate discrepancy traceable to the service and the carrier that caused it.
Several NETPARCEL accounts can be active at once, selected by rule rather than by hand. Consignments can be split by weight slab, one account for parcels under 5 kg and another above, or assigned by region with a default account for every location that matches no specific rule.
