Ask HN: Handling Shipping in Europe

The company I work for runs an eCommerce website here in the U.S. We use USPS, UPS, and sometimes FedEx for shipping domestically and DHL for shipping internationally. We are now considering starting a "European branch" that would operate out of the Netherlands, and I've been tasked with investigating how to organize our new shipping systems. We plan to ship only within the EU from the Netherlands store, and would continue shipping to other areas from the U.S. My question is, does anyone have any experience shipping within Europe that can share their experience? One thing I'm unable to find is any kind of European shipping estimate api; for UPS, DHL, and USPS, we use XML apis to get shipping quotes for our customers on the site before they check out. I contacted DHL about an XML API for Europe, but they weren't very helpful (basically they just told me to call the Netherlands, which I have a few times but haven't gotten any responses). If there are no apis, do people generally just use shipping tables?

Any experience anyone has with this would be very helpful.