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What do I do when a carrier or provider of shipping labels goes down/offline?

Can't ship because a carrier or label provider is down: check status, use another connected carrier, or record the shipment manually

To buy a label, SKULabs, your label provider (for example EasyPost, Shippo, Stamps.com or Endicia) and the carrier itself all have to be online. If any of them has an outage, rates or labels from that provider fail until it recovers. Short outages are common, especially during peak season, and they're outside SKULabs' control.

What to do

  1. Check the error in the rates window. When you fetch rates, SKULabs asks every connected carrier account at once. A provider that's down shows an error there, while the others still return rates.

  2. Check the provider's or carrier's status page to confirm the outage and see when it's expected to end. See International shipping service disruptions - service alerts list for carrier pages.

  3. Ship with another connected carrier. Pick a rate from a provider that's working. If you use the Least expensive method, SKULabs picks the cheapest rate from the carriers that responded, so a provider that's down is skipped.

  4. Record shipments made outside SKULabs. If you buy labels directly on the carrier's website during the outage, choose Manual - Shipment as the shipping method in SKULabs and enter the tracking number, so your channel is updated and inventory is deducted.

  5. Retry later. Once the provider is back, fetch rates again.

Be ready for the next outage

Connect more than one carrier or label provider, for example a direct carrier connection (UPS, FedEx, DHL Express or USPS NSA through SKULabs) plus EasyPost or Shippo. Then an outage at one provider doesn't stop you from shipping. See How do I add a carrier account to SKULabs?

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