Rate limits and latency

Shippit maintains a rate limit of 1000 requests per rolling 60 seconds per API endpoint per API key. Additionally, when booking you can send a maximum of 1000 orders per request. Keep within this rate to avoid getting temporarily blocked. If you exceed this rate you receive a 429 HTTP error. If you need a higher rate limit either temporarily or on a permanent basis, talk to your Shippit account manager, or contact Shippit support.

Label latency

When you create an order, producing the label is the final step in the process. The steps in the process to create an order are:

  1. Send a request to the order API to retrieve carrier options, which queries a range of external carrier APIs.
  2. Allocate the order to a carrier based on allocation settings, and receive a 200 response from the external carrier API.
  3. Send a request to the label API to create the label as a PDF file, and store the file in cloud storage.
  4. Retrieve the label from cloud storage, and send it to a printer.

Each of these steps takes time to process, with some steps taking longer than others. For example, the order request and allocation steps can take some time because they need to interact with external carrier APIs.

How you perceive label latency is dependent on where in this sequence you start measuring. If you create orders well before you request the label, then most or all of the processing is complete by the time you are ready for the label. If you create an order then immediately request a label, you might find that you need to poll multiple times to have the label returned from the carrier. Additional latency can also exist in the physical environment when the label is sent to the printer.

There are a range of factors to take into account when measuring label creation latency. Some of these things are within your control to adjust, and others aren’t. For a complete list of things you can do to improve label latency, as well as things that can make labelling slower, see the labelling section.

  • Carrier selection
  • Freight type
  • Package allocation
  • Network traffic

Shippit is constantly working on ways to improve the speed of these APIs, and how they work with external carrier APIs, so you might find that your label latency improves over time.