Carrier pickup times and schedules

You can define carrier pickup times to specify when carrier services pick up shipments at nodes. Carrier pickup times are discrete points in the day when a carrier collects shipments. Calculation APIs respect these times to determine the earliest ship date and delivery date for an order.

Behavior when no carrier pickup times are defined

Carrier pickup times are defined per carrier service per node. If no carrier pickup times are defined for a carrier service at a node, that carrier service is excluded from promising calculations at that node and cannot be used to fulfill orders from it.

Important: Ensure that carrier pickup times are defined for every carrier service at every node where you want that carrier service to fulfill orders. A carrier service that misses pickup times at a node is not considered for fulfillment from that node, even if it is configured.

Defining carrier pickup times

You can define carrier pickup times by specifying discrete pickup times for each day of the week. Each day can have one or more pickup times, for example, 12:00 noon and 4:30 PM. Days with an empty array indicate no carrier pickup availability on that day.


{
  "monday": [],
  "tuesday": ["12:00:00"],
  "wednesday": [],
  "thursday": [],
  "friday": ["12:00:00", "16:30:00"],
  "saturday": [],
  "sunday": []
}
Note: Carrier pickup is only available for a node with an active carrier pickup schedule. When the carrier pickup schedule expires, shipments occur only when you either re-create the recent schedule by adding new dates or you create a new schedule.

Impact on expected ship dates and delivery dates

Calculation APIs use these pickup times to determine when an order can be shipped:

  • If an order is ready before the next carrier pickup time, the expected ship date aligns with that pickup time.
  • If an order is ready after the last carrier pickup time of the day, the expected ship date moves to the next available pickup time on a subsequent day.

Multiple carrier pickup times

You can define multiple carrier pickup times throughout the day to accommodate different carrier service levels or multiple pickups by the same carrier. For example, a carrier might collect shipments at 12:00 noon and again at 4:30 PM.

When multiple pickup times are configured, the system considers the earliest pickup time at which the package is ready, factoring in lead time, notification time, inventory availability, and capacity.