Introduction
Carriers and services in PVX are designed to be a flexible way of translating your shipping requirements from your sales orders through to your shipping solutions.
There is no fixed list of carriers or services in Peoplevox. You will set up carriers using two fields:
Name
Reference
And services using up to three:
Name
Code
Outbound reference (optional)
Carrier names must be unique, as must service type codes. Each service type belongs to exactly one carrier, though a carrier can offer many services.
There are generally two options for how you will want to set up your carriers, depending on how you expose shipping options to your customers, and how your shipping partners are integrated:
Set up carriers and services that represent your actual shipping options: this is typically used when you only offer shipping via one or two specific carriers.
Set up carriers and services to represent general shipping services / SLAs: this is typically used when your shipping partner offers more advanced rules functionality for determining the best shipping options. In this scenario, you would typically set up your carrier to represent your shipping integration, e.g. "ShipRush", and then define specific services underneath that to represent the service guarantees or the rules that you want to run, e.g. "Two day", "Next day", "Saturday delivery", etc.
Setting up a carrier
Carriers can be set up via the web app UI or via CSV upload.
We advise using CSV where possible as it allows you to load multiple carriers at once, and also gives you the ability to define a reference for each one, which can be important to some carrier integrations.
Setting up services
Services can similarly be set up either via the web app by opening an existing carrier and clicking Add:
Services can also be created via CSV, but they must be linked to a carrier when doing so by providing an existing carrier's name on the file. Setting up a service allows you to define three pieces of data:
Name: Typically a human-readable description of the service
Code: Typically either the carrier's specific code that they use to refer to a particular service, or the reference used by your order system
Outbound reference: An additional reference, designed to be consumed by carrier integrations so that PVX can effectively map a service from your order system onto the corresponding shipping option provided by your carrier partner
When importing a sales order, a service type can be provided against the order. PVX will try to link the order to an existing service by first checking if any services have the corresponding Code, and if it cannot find any, then it will check for services with a matching Name.
Editing and deleting carriers and services
The carrier name can be modified via the web application, but the carrier reference, and all service type properties can only be updated via CSV upload. It is possible to delete a carrier from a service, but only if that service has never been used on an order or package. If you need to deactivate a service after it has already been used, we advise you use a CSV upload to change the name and outbound reference to clearly indicate that it is inactive.