Carrier Rate-Shop & Ship-Data Prep
Compare carrier and service options on cost and ETA for every shipment, let a clerk approve the winner, and hand clean ship-data to your label system - so staff stop guessing carriers and overpaying.
Upload shipments and rate tables, see a cost + ETA comparison for every carrier/service, approve the chosen option per shipment, and export a clean ship-data CSV in the exact columns your label system expects.
Before you start
- A shipment CSV (weight, dimensions, ship-to)
- Carrier rate tables as CSV or Google Sheet (one row per zone/weight break)
- Free accounts: Vercel, Supabase, Resend (all have free tiers)
The problem this kills
Every shipment is a tiny decision: which carrier, which service, how fast, how much. Most teams make that call by habit. They pick the carrier they always use, or whoever's sticker is closest to the printer, and they never really know what the alternatives would have cost. Multiply a few dollars of overspend across thousands of parcels and you've quietly handed away a real chunk of margin.
The other half of the pain is the keying. Once a clerk picks a carrier, someone retypes the weight, the dimensions, the ship-to address, and the service code into the label system - by hand, under time pressure, with a queue of boxes waiting. That's where the wrong service level and the transposed ZIP codes sneak in.
This tool replaces the guesswork and the retyping. It shops every shipment against your rate tables, shows the cheapest option that still hits the delivery deadline, lets a person approve it, and produces the exact ship-data file your label system already knows how to read.
What you'll build
A small, private web app for your shipping desk. A clerk uploads (or the tool ingests) a batch of shipments and your carrier rate tables. For each shipment the tool calculates the landed cost and estimated delivery date for every eligible carrier/service, sorts them, and flags the cheapest option that still arrives by the required date. The clerk reviews the recommendation, can override it, and approves. Only approved shipments roll into a clean ship-data CSV formatted for your label system - nothing is finalized until a human says go.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a single file you paste into Claude Code (an AI coding agent). It builds the whole thing step by step, and crucially it opens by interviewing you about your business - your carriers, your rate-table layout, your weight and dimension units, your service-level names, how you decide "fast enough," and your messy exceptions (residential surcharges, oversize, remote zones). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then shapes the data model, the rate math, and the export columns around your answers - not a generic template.
You get: the discovery interview, the data model, the CSV/Sheet import, the rate-shopping engine (cheapest-by-deadline), the approval screen, the ship-data export, login and per-team data isolation, an audit trail, duplicate guards keyed on shipment ID, and a full "how to know it works" checklist.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your team can open the tool.
- Row-level security so each organization sees only its own shipments and rates.
- A complete audit trail - who approved which carrier for which shipment, and when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool recommends, a clerk approves, and only approved shipments are written into the ship-data export.
- Duplicate guards keyed on shipment ID, so the same shipment can't be rate-shopped or exported twice.
Who it's for
Shipping clerks and fulfillment leads who want to stop overpaying and stop retyping - especially teams that run a label system but don't have a carrier API wired up yet. If you can fill in a spreadsheet, you can build and run this.
You've got this - paste the first prompt.