Description of ShipStation's REST API capabilities, how to generate access tokens, and how to obtain support for REST API issues.
Our REST API is available for any plan and allows for read and write access: read access to almost all data in your account and write access to create specific objects like Orders, Customers, and Products. The API is a great way to get data directly to and from ShipStation, especially when you create orders, add customers, or query your order and shipping data.
ShipStation strives to streamline shipping for online sellers, no matter where they sell their products online. We continuously add new marketplaces, shopping carts, and integration tools because we know the ecommerce space is growing. As a result, we’ve worked hard to provide developer resources to build custom integrations with ShipStation. Check out the ShipStation Developer Portal for full documentation on the ShipStation REST API.
Our API allows developers to build applications that interface with the ShipStation platform. You can use the API to handle many tasks, including:
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Manage Orders
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Manage Shipments
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Create Shipping Labels
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Retrieve Shipping Rates
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and more!!!
Attached to this article, you will find for your reference spreadsheets with API codes for many of our available shipping services. It only includes service codes for publicly available shipping services.
Retrieve Shipping Rates may be unavailable for some carriers and services.
Some carriers and services for some carriers may be unavailable to retrieve shipping rates via getRate calls. For example, getRate calls will not return usable rates for UPS Surepost®. To ensure success, check with your carrier first about which of their available shipping services support rate browsing.
To use ShipStation's API, you'll need to generate an API key and API secret that will be included with any calls made to the API. The key and secret are used to authenticate the API calls so that ShipStation updates the information within your specific account.
New Accounts Gain Access After 48 Hours
For security purposes, there is a 48-hour waiting period after you have signed up for a ShipStation account before you can generate API keys.
For quicker access or urgent requirements during the initial 48-hour waiting period, feel free to contact your trial account manager for assistance.
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Click Generate New API Keys if no key and secret are listed yet.
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Copy your key and secret.
You can then provide them to the account you wish to access the ShipStation API.
After the API keys have been generated, you'll be able to copy them from this page and provide them as needed to any API developers.
Your ShipStation account can issue only a single set of API keys at a time. The same set of API keys can be used for multiple API applications. If you generate new keys at any point, be sure to provide the new keys to any application that uses them, or the connection with ShipStation will no longer function.
There is no way to limit the scope of API access at this time. If an API developer has access to your key and secret, they'll be able to perform any ShipStation API actions available.
Before you get started with ShipStation's API, we highly recommend that you review the ShipStation Developer Portal for a full overview of all the actions that can be performed via API calls. This documentation also provides you with examples of calls and responses for API communication and detailed information on how to authenticate your API key and secret for API calls.
ShipStation's support team cannot help you design or build an API integration, but we can certainly help test API calls and make sure everything is working as designed or help you identify information within the call body that would cause errors. If you're running into issues with one or more of your API calls and need some assistance, email our API Support team directly at apisupport@shipstation.com and our team will help look into the issue with you.
No Support for Kanji, Cyrillic, and other non-Roman character sets
The ShipStation Open API does not support non-Roman character sets like Japanese, Chinese, and Cyrillic. These sets are often not supported by the carrier's label API, resulting in ??? symbols or blank spaces on the label where the characters should be.
To better assist you, please make sure to include the following information:
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The API action you were trying to perform (ex: List Shipments, Create Orders, etc.)
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The full API endpoint you were contacting (ex: https://ssapi.shipstation.com/shipments?orderNumber=zen-285858-1)
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If making a POST API call, the full JSON body of the request.
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The status code number for the API response.
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The full JSON response to the API call.
Support for API Issues
Without the above information, it can be difficult for ShipStation to troubleshoot API issues. If you're unsure how to obtain that information, we recommend that you reach out to your API developer directly for assistance pulling any available logs. We also recommend that you CC your API developer on any communication to apisupport@shipstation.com.