About reference fields and carrier mappings

Many carriers provide the ability to pass additional information to them via data fields to be associated with a shipment. While these fields are not generally used as part of the shipping process, they can associate additional data with a given package for use in reporting or billing.

Shipium supports passing of these fields as reference identifier fields and then maps them across carriers so they're applied in as consistent a manner as possible across carriers during the carrier selection and label generation process.

Some carriers require that specific information requirements be met when retrieving a label for a shipment. Shipium also supports inclusion of this information and then maps it to the carrier's required fields.

This document includes mappings from Shipium's reference identifier fields to the named reference fields for available carriers. It also provides information about specific carrier-required data.

Related fields

Many of the available carriers support specific related reference fields:

• purchaseOrderIdentifier. This Shipium field can be populated as part of the shipment entity and maps to purchase order ID.
• costCenter. This Shipium field can be populated as part of the carrier account to categorize expenses and maps to the carrier's corresponding cost center field. If this field is not populated, then one of the reference identifier fields may be used, as outlined below.

Specific reference field mapping by carrier

The reference identifier fields that follow are part of the shipment entity, whether you're creating shipments directly or using the Carrier and Method Selection & Shipment Labels all-in-one mechanism.

APC Postal Logistics

referenceIdentifier is required for all APC Postal Logistics shipments; referenceIdentifier2 is optional.

DHL

FedEx

GPS (LogixCrew)

UPS

UPS Mail Innovations (UPS MI)

USPS