ShipStation + CycleForge
ShipStation is the widest connection CycleForge has — it brings orders in, shops rates across carriers, and buys the label. It is the one integration that both reads and writes at the point of packing.
Rate shopping and labels at the bench
At pack time, CycleForge asks ShipStation for live rates across your configured carriers and services, using the ship-to address and the parcel weight. The packer picks a rate and the label is purchased in place — no second tab, no re-typing an address that already exists on the order.
Labels can be voided too. A mis-pack or a changed address does not leave you with a paid label and a manual refund request.
Rate and label calls read the authoritative ship-to and stored weight live from ShipStation at the moment of purchase, rather than trusting a copy taken at sync time. If an address was corrected after the order imported, the label reflects the correction.
Orders come in too
ShipStation can also be an order source. Orders pull in with their SKUs and weights — the two fields that decide whether a unit can be picked and rated — and land in the same outbound queue as eBay, Amazon, Shopify, and Square, in the same shape.
A multi-line order is summarised on the queue row as the first item plus a count of the rest, so a five-line order stays one scannable row instead of five.
Incremental by design
Syncs are incremental against a modification watermark: each run picks up where the last one finished rather than re-walking your whole order history. A first connection looks back 30 days so a new tenant has something to work with immediately.
Each run is bounded — roughly 2,500 orders — so a backlog drains across passes instead of one run trying to import everything and timing out. That bound is deliberate: a sync that reliably finishes beats one that occasionally does everything.
What it does not do
- It does not replace your carrier accounts. ShipStation brokers the rates and labels using the carrier accounts you have configured there.
- It does not write customer records on sync. Ship-to detail is read live at rate and label time rather than being copied into CycleForge’s customer records when an order imports.
- It is not a full historical backfill. The 30-day first-run window and the per-run bound are built to make an active operation current, not to import years of archive.
Connecting it
ShipStation connects with API credentials rather than OAuth — you generate a key in ShipStation and paste it once. It is stored encrypted per organization, never in a browser or a config file. Connect from Settings → Integrations.