FedEx Cross Border integration not cancelling labels

After speaking to the FedEx technical team, I understand that when we request a label from them via the P2P integration, the call is either accepted or given a degree of failure.

If it’s a failure, we’re fine as they do not create anything on their side but if it’s a graded fail, they are actually producing a label and saying in their API response ‘this is nearly there but you need to make a change in our portal with 24hours’. Mintsoft are (rightly in my opinion) not passing this label onto ourselves as technically, the data isn’t correct so until it’s correct and accepted, we won’t get a label but we are still getting an error message.

Point to note at this juncture is that FedEx will automatically cancel these ‘nearly but not quite’ labels in three weeks if no scans are made.

The issue we have is with the labels that have been created on FedEx’s system but not passed to ourselves. In an ideal world, as Mintsoft is not passing these labels through to us, they should be being cancelled (as they are effectively being rejected) but they aren’t and this is leading to complications. For example, if we were to run a report on the number of parcels shipped in a time period, the report would include these additional labels so we would be lead to believe we have shipped 87 parcels when in fact, we have shipped less, we’ve just had a few address issues. If we are using this figure of 87 to produce a manifest, we’d always be searching for parcels that don’t exist.

Attached is an example of the data in FedEx’s system for a parcel. This screenshot is well after the event so the additional labels have now automatically cancelled (hence my point of note above) but if we’d have run this on the day, the status would be ‘Accepted’ rather than ‘Cancelled’

Attached is also the history of the order in Mintsoft and you can see the correlation between requesting the data and the label generations.

I completely understand that the integration works and we get the right label at the right time but (hopefully) a small change to the API (to cancel the ‘rejected’ label) would improve the overall system for all your clients. The FedEx team are more than willing to enhance the way the integration is working and will offer any assistance necessary to facilitate the change.

As previously mentioned, I fully support the fact that the ‘nearly’ labels are not being passed to us, we just need them cancelling on FedEx’s system at the point of ‘rejection’ rather than then sitting there for three weeks.