Introduction

Shadow Booking is a feature that allows users to access shipment data in nShift Track without booking a shipment through nShift Ship. Customers can create shipments with the sole purpose of receiving return data and accessing the nShift Track features. These features include generating reports of all shipments and using nShift Track as a status-only product. nShift Track also provides functionality such as notifications and enriching shipments with carrier events depending on the carrier used. 

Implementation

If a shipment is flagged as a shadow shipment, nShift Ship will submit it straight to the sent section with the status of transmitted. This enables the system to bypass all the logic that occurs during the submit and transmit processes and avoids triggering API or routing calls. Because shipments are injected straight into the database, there will be no check-digit calculation, prefix addition, etc. 

Using the method POST ShadowShipments, you create a copy of an existing shipment booked outside nShift. All carrier validations will be disabled and no labels will be created.

As a minimum, you must supply the following in the Data object:

• Shipment number, package number or both.
• SubmitDate
• TransmitDate
• PickupDate 

While the above is enough for some carriers, it is usually required to send the same data needed for a full shipment including the service used - see information about the shipment data object here. 

Request

POST {{URL}}/ShipServer/{{ID}}/ShadowShipments 

• ID - the id of the actor to run the request against

Request body

The request body takes an application/json object with the following keys: data & options

{ 
   "data": {}, 
   "options": {} 
}

Go to our API documentation for more information and links to Postman collection and Swagger.

Go to the article about the Data Object.

Limitations

To successfully update your shadow shipments with carrier events, you must supply the exact information the carrier uses to match shipments in their return data.

• You must supply the correct barcode. If the carrier uses package number or another value for events and you supply the shipment number, we will not be able to match carrier data to your shipment. Note that carriers sometimes add values or send barcodes without check-digits. You must supply exactly the same barcode format as the carrier uses for events. 
  
  
• Some carriers use other parameters to match shipments such as order number, account number, or other parameters. In these cases, you must send this value in the field PortalBarcode1 (ReferenceKind 279) or PortalBarcode2 (ReferenceKind 280). If you do not supply the same parameter as the carrier, nShift will not be able to match the carrier events.
  
  
• Sometimes customers receive return data in formats not supported by nShift. This could be the case if a carrier only provides customer-specific return data in one format at a time. Customer-specific or old formats used by other book and print software may not be supported by nShift, even if the carrier is part of our carrier library. If the carrier is not able to send different customer-specific formats at the same time, the customer sometimes has to forward the return data and this may not be compatible with nShift's platform. 

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact our support team.