Optimize your tracking to avoid overages.
Our Webhook monitoring system automatically tracks your shipments as soon as you add them to your endpoint and continues until they are auto-removed (7 days after switching to DELIVERED shipping status) or until you remove them. We recommend that you regularly check the monitored shipment list to avoid overcharging. Below are listed a few good practices to help you.
Removing Old shipments
You should monitor shipments as long as you need updates for them. Depending on your use case, this could be:
- After arrival at Port of Discharge
- After Gate Out
- When you are certain that no further movement will occur...
We automatically remove shipments that have been in the "delivered" state for more than 7 days (except when there is no POD detected).
We will also remove them if we detect a new voyage has started (with a POL date > previous POD date).
If you wish to remove them sooner, you can use the DELETE /easy-shipment
API endpoint.
Removing Useless Shipments
When you add a shipment to an endpoint, we begin monitoring it. Upon receiving the first tracking information, we send the shipment.added.to.endpoint
webhook event.
In some cases, we may never receive information for a shipment due to reasons such as the inability to autodetect the sealine (in which case you should retry and specify the sealine), incorrect numbers, or unsupported sealines. If these shipments remain in your endpoint list, we will continue attempting to monitor them, resulting in charges.
We send a shipment.in.error
webhook event when we haven't been able to retrieve information from a shipment the first time we have requested information. More about this event here.
Monitor the shipment.in.error event.
When you receive such an event, look for the error message and decide whether you wish to:
- keep monitoring it via webhook (not recommended, there is a strong risk that this shipment can never be found nor auto-removed)
- delete the shipment
- delete the shipment AND recreate it with added or corrected data (correcting the shipment number, adding the sealine...)
Shipment validity check
Container numbers can be reused periodically. When they are reused, the tracking information you receive may correspond to a new voyage instead of the initial one, potentially resulting in misleading or useless data.
Specifying the sealine will ensure that the data you get comes from the correct data source.
To ensure the data is accurate, verify the details when you receive the shipment.added.to.endpoint event. Possible checks include confirming the correct sealine, ensuring the first event date matches your internal records, and verifying the expected port of delivery.
Monthly clean up
Another way to ensure you are charged only for valuable data is to perform a monthly check. Since we charge shipments by month, you can conduct a security check at the end of each month:
- Retrieve all shipments from all your endpoints using GET /easy-shipments.
- Send a container tracking request for each shipment (this incurs no extra charge). If an error occurs, remove the shipment.
- Verify that the received shipment data is still accurate (e.g., compare the first event date or Proof of Delivery (POD) location), and remove it if not.