Quick summary
Always start with one question: is the carrier officially supported by your platform? If so, connecting is configuration, not development — do not pay anyone. A custom integration earns its cost in four cases: an unsupported carrier, a negotiated rate the plugin cannot reflect, routing orders across carriers by rule, or cash-on-delivery reconciliation. That last one is what actually raises the price — not creating waybills.
Three routes, three costs
| Route | When | Cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enable an officially supported carrier | The carrier exists in your platform | Free (configuration) | An hour |
| A marketplace aggregator app | You want several carriers in one panel | Monthly subscription | Days |
| Custom API integration | Unsupported carrier or special logic | SAR 5,000 – 18,000 | 1 – 3 weeks |
Do not pay for a custom integration before exhausting the first two. We have seen stores pay thousands for something available as a toggle in their own dashboard.
Where cost actually spikes
Creating a waybill is the easiest and cheapest part. Three things raise the price: cash on delivery, where money is collected from the customer and reaches you days later in a batch, so reconciling "order paid" against "carrier remitted" is real accounting work; returns, which require a reverse shipment, an order state, stock restoration and a refund to agree; and multi-carrier routing by rule, which needs routing logic and testing of every path.
Questions to ask before paying
Is the integration two-way or send-only? What happens if the carrier API goes down — are orders queued and retried, or silently lost? Does it cover returns or only shipment creation? Who owns the carrier account keys after handover? And is there a log you can inspect when a shipment does not appear?
We do this under Salla and Zid store development for platform stores, and custom e-commerce for bespoke ones. We always start by reviewing your store — and if a platform setting solves it, we say so and charge nothing.
