Helm › Helm University › Track 4 › Lesson 4.2
Lesson 4.2What Helm does about shipping, and what it does not
Helm does one shipping thing. Four things you might reasonably expect are not there at all.
Prefer to listen? This is the same lesson, word for word. The text below is the transcript.
This lesson prepares you to: Set correct expectations about labels, rates, addresses and postage before you plan an operation around them.
Helm does exactly one thing
Helm's carrier integration exists for a single purpose: telling Helm when a parcel was delivered. That is the whole of it, and the code says so in as many words.
Delivery is what starts your payout clock, so knowing it accurately is worth an integration. Nothing else about shipping is.
The four things that are not there
| Not built | What that means for you |
|---|---|
| Labels | You buy postage yourself, wherever you already buy it |
| Rate shopping | Helm will not compare carriers or quote you a price |
| Address validation | A bad address is not caught before you print |
| Shipping rates to buyers | Shipping is free on every order, always |
That last one is the one that changes your pricing. There are no per shop shipping rates on Helm, and the shipping figure in every calculation is a hard zero. Your postage cost has to live inside your product price, and Helm's commission is charged on that price. Per shop rates are named in the code as a fast follow rather than a decision against them.
Carriers Helm recognises
Helm maps a short list of carrier names to the tracking service. If you name a carrier outside that list, Helm does not reject it. It simply omits the carrier and lets the tracking service work it out from the number itself, which usually succeeds.
So a carrier you have never heard Helm mention is fine. Enter the tracking number and let it resolve.
Tracking is not instant
Marking an order shipped makes no network call. Registering your tracking number with the carrier service happens on a background sweep that runs every five minutes.
That design is deliberate, and it had a useful side effect: it picked up every shipment that existed before the tracking integration was built, which is why the ship step needed no change at all when tracking arrived.
Old shipments stop being tracked
A shipment older than 60 days is never registered or polled. If you are looking at something that ancient, tracking will not help and the payout fallback will already have run.
A tracking error is not always your fault
If the carrier says it has never heard of your tracking number, Helm will show you that, because it means you typed something wrong. If the failure is an authentication or quota problem on Helm's side, you are told nothing, deliberately. The code is explicit that an error which is Helm's to fix must never be blamed on the seller.