International Logistics — Door-to-Door Shipping Platform for an Air Cargo Airline

Context

An air cargo airline operated several logistics verticals independently — international air freight, customs brokerage agreements in destination countries, last-mile delivery partnerships, and domestic first-mile pickup services. Each vertical had its own systems, tracking, and customer-facing processes. Customers who wanted door-to-door international shipping had to coordinate between these services manually, dealing with separate tracking numbers, handoff gaps, and no unified visibility into where their parcels actually were.

Four separate logistics verticals — air freight, customs brokerage, last-mile delivery, and first-mile pickup — with no unified service, tracking, or customer interface.

The airline wanted to combine these separate pieces into a single, branded door-to-door shipping product — one that customers could use directly through a web portal, through a REST API, or through their existing e-commerce platforms. Behind the scenes, this meant integrating with 20+ service providers across 80+ countries, each with different APIs, data formats, customs requirements, and tax modalities.

Challenges

• The airline's logistics verticals operated as silos: international freight, customs clearance, last-mile delivery, and first-mile pickup each had their own systems and tracking. There was no way to offer a single door-to-door service or generate a unified tracking number that spanned the entire journey.
• Connecting 20+ service providers across 80+ countries meant dealing with wildly different pricing structures, rate formats, customs documentation requirements, and tax handling — all of which had to be unified into one consistent experience for customers.
• Large e-commerce customers needed to pull orders from their existing stores — WooCommerce, Shopify, Amazon — and convert them into shipping labels. But each platform's order data looked different and needed validation and address verification before a label could be generated.
• The warehouse had no system for parcel reception, dimensioning, or export documentation. Staff relied on manual processes to record weights and dimensions, load parcels into airline receptacles, and produce the required export paperwork.
• Billing was extraordinarily complex: multiple customer tiers with different rate structures across multiple service types, combined with vendor invoicing where each of the 20+ providers had different cost structures, weight breaks, surcharges, and currencies.

Solution

We built a platform that unified all four logistics verticals into a single door-to-door shipping service — with proprietary tracking numbers, automated carrier orchestration, and integrations spanning e-commerce platforms, warehouse hardware, and billing workflows.

One tracking number from pickup to delivery — spanning first-mile carriers, international air freight, customs clearance, and last-mile delivery across 80+ countries.

Results