Dutch software architect. Built multi-tenant carrier middleware for 1k+ shippers; advocates idempotency and good logs.
When the busiest ordering week arrives and your carrier experiences an outage, you're left unable to calculate shipping rates and customers aren't impressed. This scenario plays out repeatedly across carrier integration platforms, but the real culprit isn't usually a simple outage. The problem starts
UPS replaced its entire existing API infrastructure, deprecating access key-based authorization in favor of OAuth 2.0 security models, with post-June 3, 2024, any transaction with UPS mandating this new OAuth security model. Major carriers are actively migrating away from SOAP-based APIs, with FedEx retiring their legacy Web Services in
Your FedEx integration responds in 200ms on average. Your local courier API takes 5 seconds. DHL varies between 1 and 15 seconds depending on the time of day. Yet most carrier integration middleware still uses static timeout values across all providers. Between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, average API uptime
Major carriers are shifting away from SOAP-based APIs to event-driven architectures faster than most carrier integration platforms can adapt. UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL are all migrating from XML based APIs to oauth JSON "REST" (not actually restful) APIs. Meanwhile, AsyncAPI 3.0.0 - is now available
Your carrier integration middleware is only as reliable as its weakest API dependency. Average API uptime fell from 99.66% to 99.46% between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, resulting in 60% more downtime year-over-year—approximately 10 extra minutes of downtime per week and close to 9 hours across a
UPS replaced its entire existing API infrastructure, deprecating access key-based authorization in favor of OAuth 2.0 security models, with post-June 3, 2024, any transaction with UPS mandating this new OAuth security model. FedEx announced on August 18, 2022 that previous FedEx Web Services WSDLs are heading for retirement, giving
Carrier webhooks fail at rates that would bankrupt a traditional SaaS platform. The business costs of webhook failures can be substantial, including lost sales, customer dissatisfaction, regulatory penalties, and operational disruption costs, and in carrier integrations, these failures happen far more frequently than other domains. The numbers tell a harsh
Your carrier API monitoring setup decides whether you catch integration failures before your customers do. Over the past over 4 years, we have collected data on on more than 332 outages that affected ShipEngine API users. You're left unable to calculate shipping rates and customers aren't
Your observability budget just tripled. Again. Those innocent-looking auto-instrumentation settings you rolled out six months ago are now generating data volumes 4-5x higher than expected, creating unsustainable costs for your carrier integration middleware. Sound familiar? If you're architecting or operating carrier integration software that handles multi-carrier API routing,
Carrier APIs change without warning. You know this if you've ever woken up to broken rate requests or mysteriously failed label generation. Integration bugs discovered in production cost organizations an average of $8.2 million annually, while contract testing catches these issues early, reducing debugging time by up
Static rate limits are failing everywhere. Financial services, telecoms, and travel sectors faced 40,000 API incidents in the first half of 2025, with attacks projected to hit 80,000+ by year end. The API management market reached $6.89 billion in 2025, yet most middleware still relies on fixed
Major carriers are actively migrating away from SOAP-based APIs, with FedEx retiring their legacy Web Services in May 2024 and moving to RESTful APIs, while UPS transitioned from XML protocols to OAuth 2.0-secured REST endpoints. AsyncAPI has emerged as the industry standard for defining asynchronous APIs, creating a unique