Challenges

A leading postal and logistics company offering a wide range of services, including mail delivery, parcel shipping, and e-commerce logistics solutions, encountered new challenges as the e-commerce landscape evolved and reliance on API integrations grew. The company aimed to enhance its client onboarding process, ensuring seamless integration with its API for both large enterprises and SMBs. As the complexities of e-commerce weighed in, optimizing and automating API consumption for customers of all sizes became essential. An increasing customer base also drove the demand for efficiency, whether a large webshop or a smaller household business.

Long onboarding and API integration time: Due to the complex nature of APIs, it took a lot of work for certain mid-to-small-sized businesses to understand all the workflows and consume the APIs in a self-serve way.

Frequent hand-holding: The complexities of the APIs and the unstructured documentation made it overwhelming for users to create their integration. This increased back-and-forth communication between the support team and customers during the onboarding phase.

To gain a competitive edge: The company wanted to capitalize on the ever-increasing e-commerce industry for customers that wanted to onboard via APIs.

Results

By choosing APIMatic, the company ensured their API documentation was structured and provided easier adoption for customers of all business sizes and varying levels of API understanding. The generated SDKs saved months of development time and effort and allowed customers to consume the API more quickly without previous complexities.

Sending a single postal package requires a lot of information, and this information was previously disorganized on the existing developer portal solution. Along with the lack of SDKs, this made it harder for developers to integrate and consume the API, leading to longer onboarding time and more hand-holding.

The company’s API team evaluated APIMatic with language-idiomatic onboarding experiences that developers love, complete with SDKs, docs, idiomatic code samples, guided walkthroughs, tutorials, and an API playground. On top of that, the whole platform was easily integrated into their existing developer site, which required minimal migration efforts.

The company rapidly introduced an easy-to-use solution for their API products:

Enhanced self-service for enterprise customers through comprehensive API documentation.
Easy self-onboarding for SMB clients, addressing both volume and scale.
Structured documentation that improved the API integration and onboarding process.