Delivery integrations are hard (but they shouldn't be)

With the transition to a world where most people buy products through their phone or laptop, every single business needs to offer a seamless delivery experience.

But to be able to offer fast and reliable delivery you need to integrate with a delivery provider first. Unfortunately, delivery integrations are not easy thing.

What makes it so hard? Let us go deeper.

• Quality of documentation: it depends a lot on each courier, but the standard API docs are normally not state of the art. They lack clarity and details, making it quite hard to integrate in a self service mode.
• Manual steps: it is quite common that to get access to the docs and start the integration you need to jump on a call and wait for an e-mail to get your keys.
• Support: most delivery companies are quite busy running their day-to-day operations and they don’t have enough resources allocated to your onboarding. Average response rate in the industry tends to be +1 day.
• Lack of specific features in the API: most providers lack some functionalities in their API. This requires additional work on your end to solve specific problems or to create a solution tailored to your case
• Every API is different: while logistics is a common space, each provider built their API in a different way. When you need multiple providers this surely adds complexity.

There is a very positive trend that that sees last-mile logistics embracing tech, but the transition is being slow. Most companies don’t treat APIs as their most important product or service. Thus, not investing enough resources to ensure both the UI (docs) and the UX (endpoints) are easy to use and add value.

At Kosmo we’ve completed more than 15 integrations so far, and we learned a fair lot in the process. There have been some that have been quite straight forward, but most processes could be significantly improved. That’s why our main goal is to make it very easy for any business to start offering delivery with a simple integration.

Our primary product is our API, and our goal is for businesses to consider our API as the default option when enabling delivery, whether in e-commerce, food delivery, or any other industry. To do that, we work on having clear docs and flexible endpoints to cover any delivery use case.

Our team has directly worked with various businesses in Asia, Europe and LATAM to help them solve their delivery. Let us know if you want to discuss about your delivery challenges. We’d be happy to chat and explore ways to solve them!

‍