Shipping

How shipping works

A Shipment sends one or more Mail Items to an address of your choice, domestically or internationally. Both Registered Agent mail and CMRA mail is eligible for shipping.

The general steps are:

1. Gather the available Shipping Methods for the given items and the destination address.
2. Create a Shipment with one of the Methods.
3. Track the Shipment.

Creating a bulk shipment may result in more than one physical shipment being created. This is because items may not be in the same physical location, or because bundling the items was not possible.

See Ship Mail and Track the Shipment for a recipe on implementing shipping via the API.

Shipments vs. forwards

In code, you will see the name "forward." The Mail Items field is named forwardDetails and the events are under the mailItem.forward.* namespace, but these are interchangeable with "shipment." When describing the action users take to send mail from Stable's facilities to an address, use the verb "ship."

Shipping costs

Shipping costs are billed to the Stable account once label(s) are created for shipment. Estimates are not provided prior to shipping due to weight differences in mail items.

Shipping costs can be found on mailItem.forwardDetails.cost as whole integer cents, and also on mailItem.forward.completed.

{
  "id": "mi_456",
  "forwardDetails": {
    "id": "shp_789",
    "status": "completed",
    "cost": 1250,
    "trackingNumber": "9400100000000000000000"
  }
}

When reconciling shipping costs, it's important to deduplicate cost on forwardDetails.id. Otherwise, you may process the same bulk shipment across n multiple mail items, resulting in accidentally summing cost x n charges.

You can learn about available shipping methods and their approximate pricing in the support center.

Tracking

Tracking is not available on all Shipping Methods, notably USPS First Class Mail. See our recommendation for Shipping Methods.