How We Fixed Our Shipping Integration Chaos with Ditto: A Fulfillment Use Case in E-Commerce
The modern e-commerce supply chain moves fast—but integrating with third-party shipping services doesn’t. We learned this the hard way, juggling broken APIs, unreliable sandbox environments, and zero visibility into request/response flows.
Our fulfillment system relied on seamless communication with multiple shipping providers like FedEx, DHL, and Shippo. Each one had its quirks, poor documentation, and long feedback cycles. Our developers were flying blind—and it was costing us.
That’s when we found Ditto, an internal mock API platform that gave us control, speed, and confidence.
📦 The Problem: Shipping APIs Were Slowing Us Down
We’re an e-commerce platform managing thousands of orders per day. Shipping is critical to our customer experience. But integrating with new carriers or updating old integrations was painful:
- No reliable sandboxes: Most shipping providers had inconsistent or outdated test environments.
- Delayed feedback: Every change needed a full deploy, then a real API hit, and then debugging based on logs.
- Hard to test edge cases: Simulating scenarios like "address not found", "label unavailable", or "customs hold" was impossible.
- Cross-team bottlenecks: Backend, QA, and devOps were constantly waiting on each other just to test a single flow.
Every integration took weeks longer than it should have, with late nights spent tailing logs and replaying requests.
🚀 Enter Ditto: Mock APIs That Work Like the Real Thing
We deployed Ditto internally as a drop-in mock server platform. Think of it like Postman—but private, flexible, and built for teams.
Here's how Ditto helped us streamline shipping integrations:
1. Created realistic mocks for all shipping APIs
Our developers used Ditto to spin up accurate mock versions of FedEx, DHL, and other APIs—with real endpoints, responses, and custom edge cases.
2. Collaborative interface
Teams could define, version, and share mock behaviors across projects. Ditto’s UI let us inspect requests/responses live and tweak behavior on the fly.
3. Integrated with CI/CD
We plugged Ditto into our automated tests, so we could validate shipping flows before hitting any real third-party system.
4. Zero downtime testing
We simulated shipping failures without bringing down real environments—testing fallbacks like retries, email alerts, and dashboard messages.
🏭 Use Case: Fulfillment → Shipping in E-Commerce
Here’s a specific example:
Scenario:
Our fulfillment system receives an order and needs to request a shipping label from DHL.
Pain Point:
In production, label requests would intermittently fail with vague 500 errors. DHL’s sandbox wouldn’t reproduce the issue, and logs gave us little insight. We had no way to simulate “label not available due to customs restrictions.”
With Ditto:
We created a Ditto mock that returned a 500 with a custom error message for certain postal codes. Within an hour, we replicated the issue and patched our fallback logic. Ditto became our go-to for reproducing every known and unknown error condition.
💰 ROI: Faster Delivery Times, Happier Devs, and Lower Costs
After adopting Ditto, our team saw immediate benefits:
We estimate that Ditto saved over 200 hours of dev time in the first quarter alone. More importantly, it helped us ship (pun intended) with confidence.
✨ Conclusion: Mocks Aren’t Just for Testing—They’re for Velocity
APIs should never be a bottleneck. With Ditto, they’re not.
Our shipping integration flow went from brittle and slow to stable, fast, and testable. If you're in e-commerce—or any industry dealing with flaky or slow-to-integrate APIs—give your team the mock environment they deserve.
Your APIs will thank you. Your team will too.
Want to see Ditto in action? Check it out here or spin up your own mock environment in minutes.
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