Availability Checks

Availability checks are a way to check if a transporter is available to deliver a shipment. This is an important step in several of Skrym's services. For example, when requesting a booking, we need to know if a transporter can deliver a specific request. Or in the context of a delivery checkout, we want to display which transporters (and their methods) are available to be presented to a user.

Since it might be harmful to call a transporter twice, we have a general way of representing availability data so it can be shared between different services and reused for different purposes.

Skrym Availability API

The API accepts multiple transport methods, which availability will be fetched in parallel. The API will return a list of availability statuses, which contains a success flag that specifies if the availability check was successful. If an availability check is unsuccessful, the field ErrorDetails lists the reason for the failure.

Warning

Note: Since errors are returned within the response in ErrorDetails, the API will always respond with 200 OK.

Delivery Location Validation During Bookings

When processing bookings, we often receive an indication of the exact delivery location chosen by the user during checkout. In these cases, we can reduce the need for a duplicate availability check by making a simplified call that validates the received location identifier for the given transporter—and supplements any additional information if needed.

When Skrym itself is the checkout provider, this extra validation step is not necessary because we already store all the required data to make bookings and verify that the location identifier is correct.

Transporter-Specific Considerations

Some transporters have unique requirements for validating the location identifier. For example:

• Instabox

  Instabox does not offer a dedicated service for validating location identifiers. However, because they share operations with Budbee, we can perform this validation through Budbee's system.

  Important: To enable validation for Instabox, please ensure that Budbee transporter credentials are configured in Scope. Without these credentials, we are forced to perform a duplicate full availability check for Instabox. This issue only arises if you are using a checkout provider other than Skrym, where only partial booking information is supplied.