Use this article to plan integration, phase 3 of your Ingrid Promise implementation: how Ingrid Promise connects to your storefront, what the transport order is, the data-flow decision you need to make, and how your WMS connects.
This article is for technical leads, developers and system owners (ERP, WMS, OMS) working on an Ingrid Promise implementation. You lead Ingrid Promise integration; Ingrid guides you with documentation and the Ingrid integrations team. This article explains what has to happen, who needs to be involved and what you have to decide. Your developers will want developer.ingrid.com for endpoints, payloads and code.
What Ingrid Promise integration actually involves
Adding Ingrid Promise itself is usually straightforward. What needs planning is how data flows between Ingrid and the rest of your systems (for example your ERP, or enterprise resource planning system, and your WMS, or warehouse management system), and that is a decision about your architecture, not about Ingrid.
Your own e-commerce stack may have more systems or fewer, connected differently. The shape of the problem is the same.
Connecting Ingrid Promise to your storefront
Your e-commerce platform fetches the Ingrid Checkout widget and places it in the checkout. From then on:
your e-commerce platform keeps Ingrid updated with cart contents and customer information
the Ingrid Checkout widget talks to Ingrid, so the shopper sees the right delivery options
On a standard e-commerce platform, an Ingrid plugin does this for you. On a custom or headless storefront, your developers build the connection against the Ingrid API (application programming interface).
The Ingrid transport order, and why it matters
When a purchase completes, Ingrid creates a transport order containing everything needed to book a shipment. Each transport order has a unique identifier, the TOS ID, and the full transport order can be retrieved from Ingrid at any time using the TOS ID.
You can view and create transport orders in the Ingrid Merchant Platform in either Ingrid environment.
The data-flow decision you need to make
Your booking system (Ingrid Transport or another vendor's) needs the transport data produced at checkout. There are two ways to get the transport data there, and this is worth deciding deliberately, because it changes how much work your ERP team has.
Option A: pass all the required transport data through your systems
Option A is the classic approach: move every required field through the intermediary systems, usually your ERP and WMS. Option A is simple to understand, but:
you have to know up front which data points booking requires
if those requirements change (adding support for add-ons, for example), your ERP may need updating too
your ERP has to carry and handle the transport data
Option B: pass only the TOS ID
In option B, you move just the TOS ID. Any system holding valid Ingrid credentials can then fetch the full transport order from Ingrid itself. In practice, the TOS ID travels through the ERP, and the WMS fetches what it needs directly from Ingrid. The benefits of option B are:
a much smaller integration surface toward your ERP
when booking requirements change, intermediate systems do not need updating
Which option fits depends on your existing setup. Scope the data-flow decision with your Ingrid implementation consultant during the planning workshop: it is a good example of something far cheaper to decide in phase 1 than to rework in phase 4.
Connecting your WMS to Ingrid Promise
Before your warehouse team starts, make sure they have Ingrid credentials for the correct merchant and the correct Ingrid environment. Staging and production credentials are not interchangeable.
Your WMS retrieves transport order data from Ingrid using the TOS ID. Because a transport order can be reopened more than once, a request returns a list of results with the most recent first, so the first result is always the current state of the transport order. Your developers will find the request format, authentication and full field reference in the Ingrid developer documentation.
If Ingrid Transport is your booking system, a booking needs only the TOS ID and the number of parcels.
Who you need for Ingrid Promise integration
Your technical lead owns Ingrid Promise integration, and needs to be available weekly rather than occasionally. Where your WMS, ERP or OMS (order management system) is involved, those system owners need to be in the conversation from the start: integration delays are far more often about availability than about difficulty. See The team you'll need.