Introduction

Unfortunately, this is harder than you might think to answer. Therefore, I will first go into the detail that is necessary for the developer to know, and then go into a bit more detail so you can see why.

For all consignments in Delivery Manager, we need the following:

• The name of the recipient
• The address of the recipient, including first and second lines, postcode and country code
• The number of parcels in the consignment must be more than zero
• The total consignment weight must be more that 0kg
• The identity of the warehouse shipping the consignment

That is the information we must end up with. To assist you, we can calculate things if you provide information about the parcels and products.

Automatically Calculated Weights & Values

To make use of automatically calculated values, you have to ensure the consignmentLevelDetailsFlag flag on the Consignment object is set to false. With that flag set, you must supply information about parcels. Ideally, you would also provide information about the products within those parcels, but that is only mandatory for international shipments (as the contents of the box has to be declared on customs documents).

The consignment weight and consignment value can be calculated automatically. If you provide a consignment weight of zero, then the consignment weight will be calculated as the sum of the parcel weights. The consignment value can be calculated in a similar way.

Also, if you provide information about the products within a parcel, but set the parcel weight to zero, the parcel's weight will be calculated as the sum of the product weights.

If you have two parcels, one with a weight of 2kg and one with a weight of 0kg, we will still regard it as valid as the total consignment weight (2+0) is more than zero.

International Shipments

For international shipments, we need to produce customs documents which specify the contents of each of the parcels. Therefore, when your consignment travels across international borders (and not within the same trading block), product information is required:

• Country of origin
• Fabric content
• Harmonised product code
• Product code (SKU)
• Description
• Quantity
• Type
• Value

Special Carriers

Due to the way certain carriers operate, they require additional fields to be populated. This is not the case for the vast majority of carriers, but those that operate lockers tend to inform the recipient of where to pick their delivery up from. This is done either through email or by SMS. Therefore, those services can only be considered when the consignment details includes that information.