Not all shipping software’s are created equal, at least that is what one of our clients recently discovered when integrating EDI with Petco. Petco has a requirement for a custom ship label and packing list, pretty standard request. The shipping label needed to include two pieces of information that was received on the order. They wanted End User PO and Petco PO… easy enough, right?

Wrong… the shipping software, that will not be named, that was originally integrated to their Shopify account couldn’t accommodate this info. It was very rigid in that it would only allow you to choose from four pieces of data and End User PO wasn’t one of them. This coupled with the fact that the packing list template the shipping software provided couldn’t be customized, at least not with the customizations Petco wanted. We were in a tight testing window with Petco and needed a solution fast.

We first reached out to the shipping solution provider to see if they offered a direct API that would allow us to access and pass the data needed to create the custom shipping label and packing list, but still no luck. We then vetted several shipping software solutions but none of them crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s. There was one shipping solution that got us 90% of what we needed. That solution was ShipStation. We were able to get the exact format Petco required for the shipping label and packing list. Creating and setting up the ShipStation account was a breeze and we were able to complete testing with Petco on time! Another successful EDI integration in the books!