Ship an Order on a Carrier Shipsidekick Does Not Integrate With

1. Purpose

Fulfill an order that ships on a carrier Ship Side Kick does not integrate with — LTL, freight, a pallet carrier, or the customer's own truck — and record it against the order, without buying a parcel label by mistake.

2. Scope

Recording the shipment and closing the order once the goods leave on a non-integrated carrier. Booking the freight with the carrier, and connecting an integrated parcel carrier to an organization, are both out of scope; for the latter see SWI-006.

3. Roles & Responsibilities

4. When you need this

Use this instruction when an order is going out on something other than a connected parcel carrier. The usual signs:

• The order is pallet-sized, or the customer has arranged their own carrier, and the ship task is showing a small parcel rate against it.

• The order shows a parcel carrier you did not choose, on every order for that customer.

• Ship Method displays a carrier name you recognise, but the rate beside it is from a completely different carrier.

Nothing is broken. Ship Side Kick selects a rate from the carrier accounts an organization actually holds, and a carrier it cannot rate can never win that selection.

5. Key concept — a shipping method is not a carrier

This is the single most commonly misread thing on this subject, and getting it wrong costs an afternoon.

A shipping method cannot introduce a carrier. Creating one named after your freight carrier does not make that carrier available, and does not stop the order selecting a parcel carrier.

Worse, a shipping method with no carrier account attached to it filters nothing at all. The order matches it by name — so Ship Method will display the name you typed — and then rate-shops across every carrier the organization holds and takes the cheapest. The result is an order that reads as though your carrier is configured while carrying a rate from an unrelated one.

Ship Side Kick integrates with parcel carriers. Freight and LTL carriers cannot be connected as carrier accounts, so for those shipments there is never a rate to select, and the answer is to record the shipment rather than to configure a carrier.

6. Procedure — record the shipment

Book the freight with your carrier first, and have the carrier's reference number to hand. Which number that is depends on how the load moves:

The Bill of Lading (BOL) is the shipping document and accompanies both. It is not the reference number — attach it as the file in step 6, and put the PRO or seal number in the field in step 4.

Then:

1. Open the order in Ship Side Kick.

2. Scroll to Label uploads.

3. Click Add Label.

4. In Tracking Code, enter the PRO number for an LTL shipment, or the seal number for a full truckload. This field is what does the work — see section 9.

5. Leave Carrier unset. The list holds only carriers Ship Side Kick can generate tracking links for, so a freight carrier will not be there. The saved record reads Carrier Not Listed, which is correct.

6. Attach the BOL under Label File, so the document is stored with the order. This is optional but strongly recommended — it is the only copy that stays with the record.

7. Optionally enter what the freight cost under Shipping Cost.

8. Click Save.

9. Ship the task as you normally would.

7. Procedure — clean up a shipping method that names a non-integrated carrier

If someone has already created a shipping method named after the freight carrier, remove it. It has no effect on rate selection, and leaving it in place makes future orders look configured when they are not.

1. Go to Carrier Accounts.

2. Open Shipping Options.

3. Find the option named after the carrier, and delete it.

8. Verification

• The parcel rate disappears from the ship task and is replaced by the tracking number you entered. This is the signal that the upload registered.

• Shipping the task closes the order without buying a parcel label.

• No shipping charge appears for a label that was never purchased.

• The order carries the PRO or seal number, so the shipment can be traced later, with the BOL attached alongside it.

9. Constraints and caveats

• Do not use Manually Fulfill Order for these shipments. It closes the order without a tracking number, and an order closed that way does not get billed for the warehouse work that went into it. The charge is not recoverable afterwards. The upload route in section 6 bills normally. This is the single most expensive mistake available on this procedure.

• The upload accepts either a tracking code or a file. Always enter the tracking code. Attaching only a file leaves the order without a reference, and it is the tracking code that suppresses the parcel rate.

• An uploaded label attaches to the whole order, not to one parcel. On an order that ships in more than one delivery, the first upload will be read as covering the rest, so upload only when the whole order is going out together.

• If the order came from a connected store, that store generally wants both a tracking code and a named carrier before it will show the shipment as fulfilled. A freight carrier cannot be named, so the store may show the fulfillment without a carrier. Tell the customer's store team what the number refers to.

• This procedure records a shipment; it does not book one. The freight must already be arranged with the carrier.

10. Worked example

A customer organization under a 3PL parent raised that every order was selecting FedEx as the carrier. The order in question was 286 units of a pressure-balance valve moving on a pallet, and it was meant to go out with an LTL freight carrier.

Resolution: this moved as LTL, so the PRO number was recorded against the order per section 6, and the order shipped on the freight carrier with no FedEx label bought. The shipping method named after that carrier was deleted per section 7. The same procedure applies to every freight and pallet-out shipment across all of the parent organization's customers.

11. Related documents

• SWI-006 — Publish a Carrier Account to Child Organizations