Overview
Ship Simple is a fast-growing logistics platform simplifying how businesses manage shipments across multiple couriers. Handling thousands of shipments daily, the team faced a recurring operational drag: validating large, inconsistent CSV uploads containing hundreds of shipment records.
Leaping Logic partnered with Ship Simple to design and develop two interlinked systems — Bulk Purchase and SmartCSV — to eliminate this manual validation burden. Together, these systems turned what was once a tedious, error-prone process into a high-speed, automated workflow.
Challenges
Before SmartCSV, bulk uploads were bottlenecks.
- Teams spent hours reformatting spreadsheets with inconsistent headers, missing data, and invalid courier fields.
- Every courier had its own validation quirks.
- Even small errors (like a phone number format or state code mismatch) could block entire batches.
- Multiple support touchpoints were needed to fix issues before uploading to the admin system (NOVA).
This manual back-and-forth slowed shipments, strained support teams, and created unpredictable upload times during high-volume periods.
The Turning Point
Ship Simple’s operations team proposed a single goal:
“If we can validate and correct CSV data automatically — before it ever reaches NOVA — we’ll remove 80% of our bulk upload issues.”
Leaping Logic took that as the core design challenge: build a validation engine that understands unstructured human data, enforces courier logic, and learns from every file it processes.
Solution
The solution was designed as a modular service stack, integrated with Ship Simple’s Laravel backend and Next.js frontend. SmartCSV acts as an intelligent middleware — sitting between the user upload and the Nova admin — to standardize, validate, and correct CSV data before submission.
1. SmartCSV Engine
The SmartCSV system became the foundation for intelligent validation. It performs:
- Dynamic header recognition – detects and auto-corrects misnamed or missing columns.
- Courier-specific rule enforcement – applies carrier-level validations such as address format, character limits, and required fields.
- Multi-piece shipment handling – groups related rows for shipments with multiple packages, verifying internal consistency.
- Conditional logic – such as waiving company name requirements for residential addresses.
- Phone normalization – converts all formats into a 10-digit standard.
Each validation returns targeted error messages (e.g., “Destination postal code must be 6–7 characters”), allowing users to correct quickly instead of re-uploading blindly.
2. Bulk Purchase Integration
Parallel to SmartCSV, Leaping Logic built the Bulk Purchase microservice, a scalable process for mass label creation. It runs two independent microservices:
- Rate Call Microservice – fetches real-time rates for each shipment in the CSV.
- Label Purchase Microservice – automatically buys labels for validated entries once rates are confirmed.
This dual-microservice model mirrors individual shipment logic but executes it in parallel threads, ensuring the system scales without performance loss.
3. Automation & Optimization
Automation jobs queue and schedule work continuously using Laravel’s queue:work and schedule:work commands to handle validation, rate retrieval, and label generation asynchronously. Caching static courier data reduced repeated API calls, cutting request volume by over 80% during bulk operations.
Results
The SmartCSV and Bulk Purchase systems transformed Ship Simple’s bulk operations.
Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Manual CSV validation time | 3–4 hours per batch | <10 minutes |
CSV error rate | ~35% | <2% |
Label purchase throughput | 1,000 labels/hour | 8,000+ labels/hour |
Staff involvement | 3–5 team members | 1 reviewer per batch |
Source: Ship Simple internal metrics (Q1–Q2 2025)
Why This Approach Works
Leaping Logic built SmartCSV not as a static validator, but as a living system:
- Courier-specific logic can be updated without redeployment.
- Validation rules are modular, allowing new couriers or requirements to be added quickly.
- Clear error messaging reduced customer support time and retraining needs.
- Cached courier metadata and dynamic rule enforcement balance speed with precision.
This architecture lets Ship Simple maintain flexibility as its courier ecosystem evolves — without re-engineering the core.
Business Impact
For Ship Simple, automation directly translated into operational wins:
- Faster Onboarding: New clients with large shipment volumes can start bulk shipping the same day.
- Reduced Support Load: 60% fewer CSV-related support tickets.
- Predictable Throughput: High-volume customers now upload and validate overnight, uninterrupted.
- Revenue Uplift: Higher throughput and fewer failed uploads improved label purchase conversion by ~20%.
“What used to take hours now happens in minutes. SmartCSV quietly does the work our team used to dread.” — Ship Simple Operations Lead
From Idea to Impact
Leaping Logic’s partnership with Ship Simple was built on one principle: intelligent systems should quietly remove friction from human work.
SmartCSV and Bulk Purchase now serve as core infrastructure — quietly validating, correcting, and automating thousands of shipments every day.