Your ShipStation API Balance pays for ShipStation API Carrier labels, additional fees, post-shipment carrier adjustments, and shipment insurance for those carriers that are automatically included with your ShipStation API account.
You can programmatically connect via API your own additional, separate carriers and see your negotiated rates inside ShipStaton API, and to connect your own carriers through the ShipStation API dashboard, see our Connect Your Carriers article.
To purchase labels for a ShipStation API Carrier, you must have funds in your ShipStation API Balance. You can add funds when you purchase the label, add them manually in your Subscription Plan > Payment Method settings, or set ShipStation API to enable auto-funding. This feature will automatically add funds once the balance falls below a specified threshold.
Set Up Billing Information and Carriers First
To add funds to your ShipStation API Balance, you must have already set up a payment method with your billing information as well as activated ShipSttion API Carriers.
To learn how you can programmatically add funds via an API call, please see the Add Funds to your ShipStation API Balance page.
After activating ShipEngine Carriers, you must add funds to create labels. All labels created using ShipEngine Carriers are prepaid, using the funds added to your ShipEngine Balance.
To add funds to your ShipEngine Balance:
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Log in to ShipEngine.
We recommend auto-funding to ensure your postage balance never falls below a set threshold amount. This will help you avoid interruptions to your workflow when creating labels.
To set ShipEngine to auto-fund your balance:
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Set the Automatically add funds toggle to On. This action will open the Add Funds popup with fields to Automatically add funds.
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Set your automatic balance amounts and maximums.
For example, if you wanted to purchase $250 any time your account balance is below $25, set the When balance falls below amount to ‘25’ and set the Add the following amount to ‘250’. Then enter the maximum number of times ShipStation API can automatically purchase postage in a day.
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Click Save.
About Auto-Funding
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This feature tells ShipStation API to add funds when we detect the ShipStation API Balance has fallen under your set threshold at the time of your label purchase.
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The minimum purchase amount is $10 regardless of currency type. The maximum purchase amount is $10,000 regardless of currency type.
Transaction History is where you can view an itemized list of transactions that affect your ShipStation API Balance.
The Transaction History grid lists transactions chronologically by date starting with the most recent. It includes the following transaction types:
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Label purchases
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Insurance purchases
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Service charges/adjustments
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Debits and credits to the ShipStation API balance
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Refunds
To review your transactions:
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Scroll past the Balance and Payment Method sections to find the Transaction History grid.
This grid shows the Date, Transaction type, Carrier, Amount, and Balance remaining after each transaction.
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Click the Calendar to view a specific date range and transaction details like the Shipment ID, Description, and Tracking number.
