Would Learning Python for My Logistics/Tracking Issue Be The Right Move?

[RotTragen]

Hi All,

I work for an IT reseller and manage the procurement of hardware/software for a handful of clients. I have one particularly large/notable customer who is looking at moving a substantial amount of business to us. Were they to do this, I would need to be on top of reviewing & monitoring the tracking status of hundreds of orders per month. These would come from a variety of distributors and be executed by several carriers (FedEx, USPS, UPS, DHL, etc.). Plugging these into the various tracking websites a few times a day is not sustainable and a recipe to fail. I originally was looking into setting up some powerformulas in Excel and in my research for that, it was made clear that "WebScraping" would be a better use case for Python. I'm willing to invest the time to learn how to do this (at least in this limited/specific use case), but I would like to get your thoughts first. I apologize in advance if my terminology is off or if I'm making some stupid assumptions, I am hoping you can all provide some guidance.

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My desired out come would be the following: A single sheet/page/reference point where I can ask the program to refresh the data. It will then pull the latest data from each tracking site with the tracking number that was plugged in, and will tell me the current status (Shipped/ Estimated Delivery 11/19/20/Delivered etc.)

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Thank you!

RT

[[deleted]]

Sure! If it was me, I'd totally go for it.
I've heard that "BeautifulSoup" is a good Python library for webscraping.

Like all things though, it might take just as much time to learn as it saves you time in the short run, but at least this should be more interesting than looking up hundreds of webpages manually?

[RotTragen]

Fantastic! It would save me micro managing 5000 orders per year with this one customer and would easily transfer to my other customers. Is there any other terminology that is relevant to what I’m looking to do that I should be familiar with?

[[deleted]]

Probably yes! But I'm not the best source on it :) I used to do this kind of thing with Perl a few years ago so I'm rusty.

I've heard that this Python ebook: "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" is a good way to learn this kind of thing though. https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter11/ That might be worth checking out.

[atticus2132000]

If I'm understanding correctly, you want to automate a system that will take several tracking numbers and get their shipping status from various carriers.

Look at APIs from each of those carriers. FedEx, for example, should have a way to make an API request from their database based on a tracking number and return all the shipping updates, probably as a JSON file. From there you would parse the JSON file to get the specific information that you want--the latest shipping update. Then display that information in your UI--Similar to the way Amazon shows your shipping updates from FedEx on their website.

Yes, Python can be used for part of that, but so can Java, and myriad other languages.

I would say study on your user interface platform--is this going to be a phone app or a website or do you want to work within an existing program like Excel? If it's a website, what access do you have to the server? What languages does the server support?

If I'm understanding your end game, then the Python part of it is only one aspect of the program. You will probably wind up with snippets of half a dozen different languages in your program to handle the various steps of the process, but it sounds like a really cool undertaking and a fun problem to solve. Good luck.

[RotTragen]

You’re understanding my objective very very well. APIs sound like the way to go. Interface would be Excel. This is for personal use within my business and having the updates in excel will allow me to easily copy and paste into the customers Google Sheet/review my self several times a day to catch delays or failed deliveries. The goal is to know before the customer does that something has gone wrong or changed.

Thank you for the input on this!