Connect Shippo or EasyPost for live carrier rates and labels

Shippo and EasyPost are shipping aggregators. You connect your own account with them. They bill you directly for every label, not Brainerce, and Brainerce never resells postage. Once connected, customers can see live carrier rates at checkout next to your own rates, and you can buy a label from the order or from Shipping.

If you ship in Israel with HFD or Cheetah, see Connect HFD and Connect Cheetah instead. Those two have no live rates.

What you need before you start

• Shippo: an API token from your Shippo account (goshippo.com, then Account, then API). Optionally a Shippo Webhook Secret, see "Tracking with Shippo" below.
• EasyPost: an API key from your EasyPost account (app.easypost.com, then API Keys). Use your Production key for real labels.
• A ship-from address for your store. If you have never set one, the setup asks for it.
• A funded carrier account. See "Automatic labels spend your balance" below.

Connect it

1. Open Apps, choose the Shipping tab, and install Shippo or EasyPost.
2. Step 1, connect your account. Paste your token (Shippo, with the optional webhook secret) or key (EasyPost). The setup has these two steps only, and the second appears only when the store has no ship-from address yet.
3. Check the key. For EasyPost, Brainerce checks the key with EasyPost before it saves. It tells you whether the key is accepted, which account it belongs to, and whether it is a Production account (every label is real postage, charged to that account) or a Test account (labels are simulated and no carrier will accept them, so real orders cannot ship until you paste a production key). If the key is rejected, check that the whole key was copied, with no spaces before or after it. If EasyPost cannot be reached at that moment, the key is shown as not checked, which does not mean it is wrong, and you can continue. Shippo cannot check a key before it is used, so a wrong token only shows up the first time a rate is quoted.
4. Step 2, where you ship from (only when no address is saved yet). Enter your street address, city, state or region, postal code, country and phone. This is saved to your store (your warehouse), not to the carrier, so every carrier you connect ships from the same place and you are never asked twice. The phone is optional, but a parcel that crosses a border needs it for the customs form.
5. Save and finish.

After you connect: package defaults, automatic labels and routing

These are not part of the setup steps. Open Shipping, press the Settings icon at the top right, and you find them in the carrier's settings:

• Package defaults (default length, width, height and weight) are used when the products in an order have no weight or size. Shippo defaults: length 10, width 8, height 4 inches and weight 1 lb. EasyPost defaults: the same size, and weight 16 oz. Set them close to your usual box, because carriers bill on size as well as weight.
• Automatic label purchase (the Automatic labels setting), Priority and Deliver only to these countries. See below.

If a carrier is connected and your ship-from address is missing, Shipping shows Nobody can be quoted a shipping price right now with a form to add it. See Shipping overview.

What the customer pays

At checkout Brainerce asks every connected live-rate carrier that ships to the customer's address for prices and shows them next to your own Zones & Rates options. The customer pays the price they were shown. Brainerce does not add a handling fee, and you cannot hide individual carrier services from the list. If the carrier cannot be reached while a customer checks out, the customer still sees your own rates.

A carrier quotes in its own account currency, and Brainerce converts it to your store currency at the time of checkout.

Buy a label

By hand. Press Buy label on a row of the Shipping page, or open the order's summary and press Create Label in its Shipping label box. Pick one of the quoted rates and press Purchase Label. You can enter the weight and size of the parcel under Package details (optional): what you type wins for that label. Billing goes directly to your carrier account.

Automatically. Open Shipping, press the Settings icon and use Automatic labels: Off, I buy each label myself (the starting setting for Shippo and EasyPost), 30 minutes after payment (recommended) or Right after payment. When a customer paid for one specific service at checkout, automatic buying purchases that same service. If it is no longer offered, Brainerce buys nothing and records a failed purchase under Needs attention, rather than silently giving the customer a slower service.

Automatic labels spend your balance

Each label spends from your carrier account with nobody watching. If the balance runs out, orders stop shipping and the only sign is a failed purchase under Needs attention. Keep auto-reload switched on in your carrier account before you turn automatic labels on.

Tracking with Shippo

Shippo gives Brainerce tracking updates through a webhook secret that Shippo issues to you. It is not self-serve: ask your Shippo account manager for it, then paste it into Shippo Webhook Secret (optional) in the Shippo settings. Until it is set, tracking does not update by itself. Rates and labels work without it, but tracking events do not arrive on their own, so do not expect the order to move to Completed when the parcel is delivered.

Tracking with EasyPost

Brainerce registers the tracking webhook with EasyPost for you. You do not enter any secret. When EasyPost reports the parcel delivered, the order moves to Completed and the customer gets the delivered email.

Cancelling a label and return labels

Whether EasyPost refunds a cancelled label is up to EasyPost and the carrier, and the refund window differs by carrier. Brainerce shows you the carrier's answer. See Cancel a shipment.

Using more than one carrier

You can install several shipping apps. Each has a Priority (a whole number from 1 to 999, or empty) and a Deliver only to these countries field in its settings (two-letter codes separated by commas, for example IL, JO).

• When two carriers can deliver to the same address, the one with the lower Priority number buys automatically. With no priority set, the carrier you installed first does. Two carriers with the same priority tie to the older install.
• Deliver only to these countries can only narrow what a carrier offers. It cannot send a carrier somewhere it cannot deliver.
• At checkout, every connected live-rate carrier that ships to the address is quoted, and the label is later bought from the carrier that issued the rate the customer chose.

What Shippo and EasyPost do not do in Brainerce

• No merchant control of which carrier services customers see, and no handling fee on top of a quote.
• No address check before you buy a label.
• No separate test mode switch. A test key makes simulated labels. See "Connect it" above.

Need a hand? Email [email protected].