How to Update Tracking Details on e-Stores via a Unified API?

API2Cart
4 min readOct 28, 2023

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To ensure the success and growth of an eCommerce business, it is crucial to provide customers with a satisfactory purchase experience. The entire process, from selecting products to placing orders, making payments, receiving tracking URLs or numbers, and finally receiving the product, plays a vital role in determining customer loyalty.

Therefore, updating tracking details efficiently across all online stores is essential to keep customers informed and engaged with their purchases.

As an eCommerce software provider, it is vital to assist your clients in updating tracking information on all the eCommerce platforms they have their stores built on. Tracking URLs and numbers is critical for e-store owners to provide regular updates about orders to their customers.

This information enables customers and store owners to know the location of the product and the estimated time of its arrival. Failure to update tracking details on all eCommerce platforms can negatively impact customer experience and the overall business reputation. E-retailers would need help to make necessary decisions for missed product shipments.

Which B2B Software Providers Need to Update Tracking Details?

Having accurate shipment and tracking information is crucial for managing an eCommerce business. Suppose you are a software vendor providing solutions like shipping management, order and inventory management, warehouse management, drop shipping and ERP. In that case, you need shipment tracking for your systems to function effectively and provide optimal functionality to your clients. Let’s take a closer look at how these different systems use shipment and tracking information.

Shipping Management Software:

As evident, shipment and tracking information is essential for shipping management software to operate. The software needs such information to ensure the product is delivered to the right customer at the right time. Tracking URLs and numbers allows the software to update the store owner about the product’s location.

Order and Inventory Management Software:

Order and inventory management systems need shipment and tracking information to import orders from the sales channels and track their status throughout their journey. This way, the order management system can track placed orders, canceled orders, carts, and other related information. Similarly, inventory management systems use tracking information to update product availability status across all the stores. Hence, as software vendors, it is essential to update tracking details for such software to track products and notify online shoppers on time.

Warehouse Management System:

Warehouse management systems need shipment and tracking information to ensure product orders are in stock and delivered directly to the customers. Delivery persons, shipment routes, and pathways are all managed by WMS when it has accurate tracking details for the product. Shipment and tracking information allows WMS to organize warehouse operations, track products, increase order fulfillment speed and accuracy, and perform accurate inventory updates.

Dropshipping Software:

Dropshipping systems rely entirely on shipment and tracking information to make their business model successful. From placing orders to delivering the product, customers depend on the reliability of dropshipping businesses. Hence, the software needs to update tracking details accurately to provide consistent product updates to its customers. Shipment and tracking information allow drop shipping systems to upload product data, update order statuses, and auto-sync inventory levels across various sales channels. Moreover, dropshipping strategies can also get and sync product information, prices, customers, categories, and more.

ERP Software:

ERP systems use the product database and barcode details to check delivery dates and track shipment status in real time. Therefore, they allow e-retailers to monitor their eCommerce operations through one dashboard and generate reports, making the business easier to manage. For all such operations, ERP systems must update tracking details to use accurate information to create reports and update online customers.

Why do B2B SaaS Companies Depend on eCommerce Integration?

E-commerce software is essential for online retailers, but it must be able to access data from client stores across multiple e-commerce platforms to function effectively. Integration with platforms like Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce allows for seamless updating of tracking details and other relevant information on client stores.

Many SaaS companies attempt to develop integration in-house, but there are significant pitfalls associated with this approach. Integration is a complex process that requires advanced developers with expertise in the unique architecture of each e-commerce platform. These developers need help finding and training.

Moreover, integrations take between 4 to 8 months to develop. If multiple integrations are required, the process can seem never-ending. This comes at a high cost, with each integration costing over $4000, not to mention hiring, training, and onboarding developers, setting up infrastructure, and resources required to develop the integration.

Integrations require consistent upgrading and maintenance as e-commerce platforms keep updating their APIs. This adds to the time, money, and complexity involved in the integration process.

As a result, even small operations like updating tracking details face significant challenges in setting up integration.

How to Easily Add an Update Tracking Info via API2Cart?

The easiest way to integrate with eCommerce platforms and update tracking details on client stores is by using API2Cart. Its unified API allows B2B SaaS companies to connect with 40+ shopping carts and marketplaces in one go. It offers more than 100 API methods to retrieve and manage data related to orders, products, customers, shipments, etc.

To add/update tracking details easily on e-stores, API2Cart provides the following API methods:

  1. Order.shipment.add — This method allows software vendors to add all the shipments associated with an order.
  2. Order.shipment.update — With this method, the software vendors can update the shipments related to an order to the client stores.
  3. Order.shipment.tracking.add — You can add tracking URLs and tracking numbers to all the shipments using this method.

You can try these and other supported methods by registering a free 30-day account. If you have questions about how API2Cart works, contact us, and we will gladly help you.

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API2Cart
API2Cart

Written by API2Cart

API2Cart is a unified API provider that establishes integration with 40+ shopping carts, including Magento, WooCommerce, Bigcommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop, etc.

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