David Chen

Beginning September 1, 2025, the U.S. Postal Service will require all international commercial shipments to include a six-digit Harmonized System (HS) code on customs declarations. This mandate hits European manufacturers and wholesalers particularly hard since many rely heavily on USPS for cost-effective international shipping. The bigger challenge? Failing to

Your carrier API just returned a 504 timeout error while processing a critical shipment. Your rate shopping service is down. Tracking updates stopped flowing an hour ago, but nobody noticed until customers started calling. Despite UPS enacting a nearly 10% average rate increase in January and businesses potentially facing over

Last month, I watched a major European retailer lose €180,000 in revenue during Black Friday because their DHL Express API integration failed validation on address formats. The shipments went through, but delivery attempts failed at a 23% rate. Their operations team spent the following week manually calling customers and

Most European shippers trying to modernize their carrier connections face the same dilemma: their EDI systems work, but APIs promise faster integrations and real-time data. The solution isn't choosing one or the other – it's building a hybrid EDI/API integration strategy that leverages both protocols while

Manual carrier onboarding is expensive. Automated carrier onboarding processes can deliver up to 80% time savings compared to manual methods, while companies like Shippeo guarantee that 90% of carriers will be onboarded in less than 30 days. For European shippers managing dozens or hundreds of carrier relationships, these numbers represent

When DHL's API went down for six hours last November, a major electronics retailer in Germany couldn't process 3,200 shipments. Their TMS kept retrying the same failed endpoint while orders backed up. No backup carrier was configured. No manual procedures were in place. The result?