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It's nice to see startups tackling shipping APIs - they really are ugly.

What I'd really like to see is something that reaches down to the inventory level, I.e. I'm shipping these 5 SKUs, what's the best price among the carriers I support.

It's a complex problem (from experience) but it would provide real value to smaller shops who want to implement economy shipping but don't want to deal with all the APIs.

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The idea is awesome, but handling products via a SKU is hard. For instance, if you had the SKU 517030000077284 (a Gibson Les Paul) how would you determine the package size that each customer individually uses? Or determine how much extra weight was added by packaging to keep the guitar safe?

I would love to solve this problem but it is definitely a hard one to solve.

Or even worse, say it was a BC Rich, or a Dean, but only certain models that would require the package being just a tad bit wider?? :)

Like I said, it's complex - for our internal solution we just queried for rates for all of our box sizes, and then our software suggests the cheapest it thinks will fit, but allows the warehouse guy to override it. It has a really simple formula for "learning" when he chooses something different.

A general solution would be much harder, but if it had existed we would have forked over money without too much thought.

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