This document provides an overview of how to use 7bridges' REST APIs to handle shipping operations and maximise the platform's capabilities, depending on your requirements.
You can view detailed descriptions of each API endpoint that you can access via the online documentation available at:
<your-subdomain>.the7bridges.com/api/v2/redoc/
Note that only the documentation for the endpoints that have been enabled for you to use will be visible. If there is something missing that you want to use, contact your account manager.
API Overview
These are the main resources that you can interact with over our API.
1. Orders
An order is a transaction between two parties for goods (order "items"). You can create, modify, and retrieve orders using the /api/v2/order** endpoints. Orders contain all the details about the items being shipped, as well as the parties involved in the transaction. Orders do not create a shipment but indicate an intent to create a shipment to fulfil the order.
2. Movement Demands
Once you are prepared to fulfil your orders, create a movement demand to notify 7bridges that all or some of the items in the order should be fulfilled. The movement demand is identified by the order code of the order the movement demand is for, and a pick list name. You can create, modify, and retrieve movement demands via the /api/v2/movement_demand/** endpoints.
A movement demand is simply a request to ship items, and the key information associated with it is what items to ship (and how many) and where to ship them from. It does not include information about how the items should be packed nor in what packaging: that is handled by the shipment, see below.
3. Shipments
A shipment is the mechanism for fulfilling orders using 7bridges carrier integrations. When you create a movement demand for an order using API, by default, the 7bridges platform creates a shipment for you to configure through the web interface.
If you want to use your software to configure packaging types and weights and utilise 7bridges only for its optimisation capabilities, then you can disable automatic creation of a shipment and do it explicitly. You can use the /api/v2/movement_demand///!create-shipment to create and configure the shipment and then /api/v2/shipment//!get-postage to create labels, a tracking code, and other documentation.
4. Stock
Use the /api/v2/stock/* endpoints to keep the 7bridges platform up to date with your stock levels. You should use /api/v2/stock/batch-update-and-reset/ initially (or after an outage or large change) to set the entire stock state, and then use /api/v2/stock/batch-update/ as stock changes occur to send incremental updates.
This ensures that the 7bridges optimisation tools have an up-to-date view and do not try to allocate items to locations that have no stock.
Further reading
7bridges Optimisation points - explains how the API interacts with the 7bridges optimisation engines.