What are Manifests?
Manifests or ScanForms refer to the process of sending advance notice of a shipment or shipments to a carrier. Many carriers will also supply a "driver manifest summary" document that is required to show pickup drivers when they come to pick up packages. Many carriers require manifesting to be done before shipments are picked up or dropped off. The transmission methods for each carrier are different, but for some carriers, the method is secure file transfer protocol (SFTP). On occasion, SFTP file transfers may fail for a number of different reasons, many of which are outside of EasyPost's control. In this article, we will offer some standard steps that users can take to try to recover from these failures.
Individual Shipments
For individual shipments, manifest recovery is simple. Users can simply reattempt to manifest the individual shipment in question.
Batches
Many EasyPost users who ship at larger volumes like to utilize the EasyPost batch endpoints to manage manifesting many shipments at one time. Please note that it is recommended to keep each batch under 1,000 shipments. This best practice helps avoid timeout errors during the batch buying process.
When a manifest failure happens with a batch of shipments, here are the recovery steps:
- Create a new batch https://www.easypost.com/docs/api#create-a-batch
- Add shipments to the batch https://www.easypost.com/docs/api#add-shipments-to-a-batch
- Scan Form (manifest) new batch https://www.easypost.com/docs/api#manifesting-scan-form
If failures continue to happen repeatedly, please contact support@easypost.com for further assistance.