Thomas Richter
I have watched our customers do this too many times. Four browser tabs open. Four carrier portals loaded. Package dimensions typed in four times. Prices copied and pasted into a spreadsheet to figure out the cheapest option.
That workflow is absurd. And honestly, we should have built this sooner.
What we shipped today
Starting today, you can compare shipping rates from DHL, DPD, InPost, UPS, and every other carrier in our network with a single API call. One request. All the prices. Sorted and ready.
No more tab juggling. No more spreadsheets. No more "wait, did I enter the right weight for that DPD quote?"
How it works
The concept is dead simple. You send us the package details and the destination. We query every carrier simultaneously and return a unified list of options with prices, estimated delivery times, and service levels. The response comes back sorted by price by default, but you can sort by delivery time, carrier preference, or a custom priority you define in your dashboard.
Every option in the response includes the carrier name, service level, price in your preferred currency, estimated delivery days, and the delivery type - whether it is door-to-door or a pickup point like a locker. The response also tells you which option is cheapest and which is fastest, so your system can make decisions automatically without any human involvement.
You send the request to the rate comparison endpoint on our Shipment API with origin details, destination details, parcel weight and dimensions, and optionally a list of specific carriers you want to compare. If you leave the carrier list empty, we compare all carriers available for that route.
It really is that straightforward.
Why this matters more than you think
I have talked to dozens of e-commerce teams over the past year, and the pattern is always the same. They start with one carrier. Then they add a second because customers want locker delivery. Then a third for international orders. Before they know it, they are managing four carrier integrations and nobody remembers which one is cheapest for a three-kilogram parcel going from Munich to Prague.
Last month I was helping a mid-sized retailer analyze their shipping costs, and we discovered they were overpaying by roughly fourteen percent. Not because they had bad carrier rates - their negotiated prices were actually quite competitive. The problem was that their system always defaulted to the same carrier regardless of the shipment details. They simply did not have the tooling to compare on the fly.
Fourteen percent on a shipping budget of two hundred thousand euros per year. That is twenty-eight thousand euros just gone. For no reason other than a lack of real-time comparison.
With rate comparison built into the API, you can make cost-optimal decisions programmatically on every single order. No human in the loop. No spreadsheets. Just the cheapest option that meets your delivery requirements, selected automatically.
Smart defaults and filtering
You do not have to compare all carriers every time. The feature supports rules that narrow down the results before they even come back to you.
Only show options under ten euros - great for maintaining a free-shipping threshold without eating your margins. Exclude carriers that do not offer door delivery - because some customers genuinely do not want to walk to a locker. Filter by estimated delivery window - "only show me options that arrive within two days." Prefer carriers with real-time tracking - which, through our Tracking API, you already get for every carrier in the network.
These filters run server-side. You are not paying for rate lookups you will just throw away.
I find the delivery window filter particularly useful. One of our beta testers set it up so that standard orders compare all carriers with a three-day delivery window and pick the cheapest. But express orders only consider options arriving within one business day. Same integration, different parameters, completely different carrier selection behavior. Clean and simple.
What our beta testers found
We tested this with about thirty merchants over two months before launching publicly. The results were better than I expected.
Average shipping cost dropped by eleven percent when merchants switched from a fixed carrier to dynamic rate comparison. That number surprised me. Eleven percent, across thousands of shipments, just by picking the cheapest option for each individual parcel instead of always using the same carrier.
The most popular setup among testers was simple. Compare three carriers. Auto-select the cheapest option that delivers within three days. Fall back to a default carrier if the comparison times out. That is the entire configuration. Completely hands-off once it is running.
One tester - a fashion retailer based in Berlin shipping about fifteen hundred parcels a week - told me they saved more in the first month than they spent on their entire UniShip subscription for the quarter. I like hearing things like that.
Another interesting pattern emerged with cross-border shipments. For domestic German orders, DHL almost always won on price. But for shipments to Poland, InPost frequently came in thirty to forty percent cheaper. Without rate comparison, those Polish shipments would have gone through DHL at a higher price by default. The system caught the savings automatically.
Getting started
If you are already using the UniShip Shipment API, you can start using rate comparison today. It is available on all plans, including the free tier with a limit of one hundred comparisons per day.
Check the documentation for the full parameter reference. And reach out to us if you run into anything unexpected. We are still ironing out edge cases for a few regional carriers, so your feedback genuinely helps us improve.
One API call. All the carriers. The best price. That is it. That is the feature. Sometimes the best product updates are the simplest ones.