In this Documentation:

• Authentication
• Rate Limiting
• Sandbox Account
• Data Types and Formats
• Concepts
• Common Use Cases
• Endpoints
• Tracing Your Calls
• FAQ

Freight API provides programmatic access to GSS functionality and content.
The API is REST API and uses single token key authentication. Currently, the return format for all endpoints is JSON.

Authentication

We only support authenticated requests. Every API request needs to contain the following headers:

• access_key : your unique API key provided by GSS
• site_id : which site you are requesting action for
• supportemail : your developer email address, that we may email, if a high level of failures or request issues are encountered.

You can get your API access key by signing in to GoSweetSpot at nzc.gosweetspot.com/ and going to your Administration > Preferences & Settings page, then expanding Advanced Settings and your API access key is at the bottom. Note that API access keys are different for each user and each account. It helps the API identify which client account and user to use.

Rate Limiting

Presently, we are not enforcing any rate-limiting. If you find that you are hitting our API at the rate of more than 60 calls per minute or 1000 calls per hour, then your usage needs to be reviewed. More often or not, there could be a better way to deal with the problem.

Sandbox Account

You can create a sandbox account by visiting https://nzc.gosweetspot.com/opensandbox

Data Types and Formats

• All requests and responses are in JSON format only.
• Date & Time: when not specified on the endpoint, the timezone will be NZ Timezone.

Concepts

Customer orders and shipments are two important but different concepts in GoSweetSpot, where a customer order maps one-to-one with an order from an e-commerce system. In contrast, a shipment is one or more packages going to the same destination on the same carrier.

GoSweetSpot dispatches a customer's order as one or more shipments depending on the item's nature, dimensions and weight. e.g. a single order with a large 30kg plant pot and some seed packets might be split into two shipments - 1 bulk carrier shipment for the plant pot and 1 courier shipment for the seed packets.

If you are integrating with an eCommerce, most likely, you will want to create customer orders rather than shipments, and the user will use GoSweetSpot's system to create the shipments from the orders.

Common Use Cases

You have a custom bespoke e-commerce or order platform

Your site does not allow external systems to feed information into it directly. 
Your approach will be to publish orders to GSS once the orders are ready for dispatch/labelling. On the GSS system your user would process the order. 
At some stage, your system will request the order status update from GSS.

The API interactions would be:

1. PUT api/customerorders - triggered from your site when the order is ready for ticketing.
2. Using the GSS web portal, your dispatcher tickets the goods.
3. GET api/customerorders - triggered by your system every 6 hours, to get status updates on the order published earlier.

You have a very specialised dispatch workflow

Click to Zoom

You might have a special requirement to integrate the ticketing directly into your existing system. Using an external system to do one part of the workflow may affect performance and be unacceptable. You can use the GSS API to build the ticketing into your system. 
The api interactions would be:

• POST api/rates - your system at dispatch, calls the API to get all available freight options and rates
• POST api/shipments - the dispatcher reviews the freight options from (1) and makes a selection. A second call to generate the shipment is triggered. 
  You use an open-source platform

Many open source systems, also have an open API platform that GSS can tap into to build the integration directly from within GSS. We would consider any platform that our customers are using. However, depending on platform popularity, the implementation time frames would be considered. If there are very few users on the platform, it may not be a sufficient business case for us to undertake the integration.

You use an open-source platform

Click to Zoom

Many open-source systems, also have an open API platform that GSS can tap into to build the integration directly from within GSS. We would consider any platform that our customers are using. However, the implementation time frames would be considered depending on platform popularity. If there are very few users on the platform, it may not be a sufficient business case for us to undertake the integration.

Others

Surely, there will be other cases that the API can be applied to. Talk to us, and we will be able to help.