Welcome to the documentation database for the Shipper Webservices, the web based API for DPD Belux.

Please keep in mind that this Webservice connection and our online platform DPD Shipper Online (shipper.dpd.be) are two separate systems. Shipments made in our Webservices will not be visible in DPD Shipper Online and vice-versa.

This wiki describes how to integrate DPD Shipper Webservices into your own application. The DPD Shipper Webservices provides five web services:

• The Login Service to authenticate the user. This step will respond with an authentication token, which you will need to communicate with the other Services below.
• The Shipment Service to generate parcel labels
• The ParcelShopFinder Service to find the nearest Parcel Shop.
• The Parcel LifeCycle Service to request the status of your parcel.
• The End-of-Day service to compose a list of your shipments.

You will find more information about each Service separately in the menu on the right.

All five services are SOAP WSDL services. This means the XML protocol is used to communicate between your application and the DPD Shipper Webservices. For the time being, only SOAP 1.1 calls are supported. REST services will be made available later on.

Our Webservices have a Staging environment and a Live environment. Staging is for tests and will produce labels that are not valid (which can be recognized because there’s “DEMO” written on them)
Live is for making actual shipments. It’s recommended to properly test your integration solution first, which you can use the Staging environment for.
You will find the endpoint URL’s for Staging and Live here.

Please use the ‘GET’ method to obtain valid responses from both environments.

By integrating your system via our services your integration will always be up to speed with the latest developments in the DPD System.

The ParcelShopFinder service will provide you the latest data about our Pickup parcel shop network.

The Shipment service will provide you with a PDF label generated using the latest routing specs this way you won’t have to update your system every few months.
And will forward the data directly into our system so we know your parcel is coming our way.

Our KPIs

The KPI’s mentioned here are the system response times for the live environment. The stage environment have no KPI’s. External factors like narrow-band internet, routings and other factors outside DPD systems, are non measurable and out of scope.

What you can expect

1. Login Service (max 0.5 sec.)
2. ParcelShopFinder Service (max 1 sec.)
3. Shipment Service :: Depending on the amount of labels in the request (between 1 and 20) max 5 sec.

What we expect

1. Maximum of 10 login requests every 24hours
2. Local retention of parcel shop data (vs reloading it via the service) for lookup purposes. Each new shipment however requires a new call to obtain valid parcelshops.
3. Minimal amount of orders (multiple parcels possible) per shipment request
4. Maximal request of 30 labels / min.

Best practices

To ensure the stability and performance of our services for all shippers we maintain the following optimizations:

1. Not more than necessary – 10 at the most – login requests per day. (cache your Token, refresh on LOGIN_x)
2. Cache ParcelShop finder responses per client request/checkout.
3. Try to make one shipment request per order (order may contain multiple parcels)

What to do to go live

Checklist

1. Contact your sales contact and request a staging account for the DPD Shipper Webservices.
2. You will receive stage credentials from DPD Customer IT.
3. Start developing against our web services (Put your IT dep. in contact with DPD IT for sparring purposes)
4. Generate a label for each product you wish to use
5. Send these labels (PDF) to your responsible DPD IT department (IT.CS@dpd.be)
6. Fix possible issues requested by DPD IT
7. Go back to step 4 (if applicable)
8. Request switch to live environment
9. (optional) Test products with live parcels.