Hello, don’t think this has been requested yet so thought I’d get this in.
It would be great to get integrations with couriers so we could book deliveries, print labels and have Breww update the customer with tracking info all from within Breww. Ideally this would work with orders placed natively in Breww, as well as orders that were pulled from ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Sellar. We currently use APC for our shipping but I’m sure there’s a fair few people using DPD and others too.
Thanks, Jack, for putting this on the community - you’re right, it’s high time this was on here
Can we please have some feedback on how you (and others) would feel about this being an addon, which costs ballpark 5 pence per order? (For orders where you generate courier labels only.)
Due to the number of couriers, that are used, this could easily escalate out of hand on the number of requests and from past experience, (in a previous life I build warehouse management software) couriers change their requirements often, so there would be a lot of on-going work to support multiple courier integrations.
For everyone who’d like to see this supported, please give this a vote using the button in the top-left and tick all the couriers below that you’d like to see supported.
Which couriers would you like to see label creation/tracking for?
Definitely curious about this, costs seem fair, and have a couple questions:
If integrated how would the user workload compare to the speed/ease of downloading a batch CSV & uploading to the appropriate courier (as we currently do)? Granted this doesn’t put the tracking information into breww for us, but it is extremely quick, and tracking can be carried out on couriers online portal.
With regards to B2C/third party platforms like shopify, squarespace.etc would breww be able to feed back tracking information alongside fulfilment to ensure customers receive tracking information?
Thanks for the great question, Steve, and everyone else for your votes on this. Please keep them coming in.
Our current thinking is as follows:
Allow for courier labels to be generated directly in Breww as PDFs that you can print, just like other labels Breww generates. These can be generated per delivery, or in batches like the current CSV exports. You could, for example, in a couple of clicks generate delivery labels for all APC orders for a day and print them off in the same order as these orders are shown on Breww & the pick list.
You would also be able to re-print or cancel labels generated and generate end-of-day manifests if required by your courier.
As Breww has generated the label, it knows the tracking numbers already and will link these to the orders in Breww and allow viewing the tracking details directly within Breww without having to go off to the courier’s own website to view it. Some couriers allow great “deep links” directly to the tracking information and some don’t, so this could save lots of time filling in forms on the courier’s website.
Where supported by integrated e-commerce platforms, we could sync over the tracking numbers. This is already done on our Shopify integration (if a tracking number is entered manually before marking the delivery as complete). Squarespace’s API supports this feature too, so this could be added for Squarespace too (and most of the other integrations).
In order to allow label generation, Breww would need to know the number of labels needed and courier service to use (e.g. 24h, 48h, etc and these would vary from courier to courier). Our thinking is that we build a tool to let you specify rules, so these values can be derived automatically to save you specifying them on each individual order. You could also use the rules to have Breww automatically determine which orders go via APC and which go via Royal Mail (for example), to save you choosing this on each individual order.
What are your thoughts on this? Is there anything else you’d like to see this support?
Just had another thought/question on this - how deep do these links go - for instance, as it currently stands we generate our labels, then when they are collected, we mark our courier orders as Out for Delivery, but do not Complete them until we can see on the portal they have been delivered (hopefully to catch problems earlier) - how much of this would breww be able to automate? Or is this integration purely about label generation?
E.g.
Would breww know that they had left duty suspense once the courier had scanned the delivery out & update accordingly?
Would breww know that a delivery had been delivered and update accordingly?
It would be amazing to have the functionality where we could mark orders as left duty suspense/picked up but they weren’t marked as delivered until the courier marked as so on their own systems.
You generate the labels (you’d be able to do all for a chosen courier at once or one-by-one). This doesn’t update the status of the delivery at all.
You mark as left duty suspense when the collection occurs.
If step 2 wasn’t done, but we found a tracking event that was clearly after collection (e.g. at delivery hub, consignee carded, etc), we could mark the delivery as left duty suspense for you automatically.
Upon delivery completion coming through on the tracking, we could mark the delivery as completed in Breww.
I don’t see a problem with that process for 99% of cases, but sometimes couriers fail to update their tracking 100% of the time, it’s quite rare, but does happen, so you’d probably want to keep an eye on any that hadn’t been marked as complete after a few days and may need to mark the odd one as complete manually.
The tracking functionality will likely vary from courier to courier and there may be some where tracking isn’t available at all (e.g. some Royal Mail services), so sometimes it would be up to you to complete all the deliveries yourself, but even now you can do these in bulk per-courier, so I don’t see this being a problem.
We also envisage showing tracking history/events directly within the delivery section on an order and on the main page for a delivery, so you can see all the tracking history available to us from the courier.
Thanks, Justin. Not yet, I’m afraid, but this is something we’re really keen to get to soon. We’re working hard to improve Breww all the time, but with multiple requests coming in every day, it takes quite a bit of keeping up with! We will always post an update on the thread if there’s progress
Our Courier Partner is Whistl and we have 100-300 unique orders going out per day currently, so having the ability to generate labels in Breww would be AMAZING for us with the other functionality you already offer with the Pick List etc. Our business model is skewed way heavier to eCommerce so this functionality would be revolutionary for us not only in Customer Service who are monitoring and generating the labels, but also in our actual warehouse operations.
Thanks, Zach, this is really useful information. We’re keen to get to this project soon as it clearly had a lot of support. We’ll post updates here when we know more.
Hey Luke,
Another option might be an integration with something like Zenstore. We use that for our webstore as it connects into it and then drags the orders in, from there we can decide who we want to send it with. Possibly a system where in Breww if we put a sale in and mark it as courier delivery and then the courier as Zenstores that it would then pull that order with the delivery details, order details and contact details into Zenstore. Once it would then be marked as dispatched in Zenstore it would then tell Breww that it is complete
Thanks, Justin. I know it was considered in the past, but they don’t have a public API, but this could still be a good route. We’ll have another look into this option (and their competitors).
Just wanted to add my vote for this. Pretty much all of our stuff goes out via courier so we have a load of courier accounts and integration here would be massive for us.
Similar to Justin’s post above. I can appreciated creating lots individual courier integrations is loads of work as there are so many but there are a few 3rd party routes that could take the bulk of the work out.
We use Shiptheory. Currently we have it Breww → Xero → Shiptheory -->> Courier. It works well but there is a few extra steps involved in getting it to work.
One good thing about Shiptheory over the other ones is the integrated labels are great for bulk printing. You get the packing slips and the label with 1 click (or auto-print if you want it set up like that)
