Colete Online
LogisticsConnect AI agents to Colete Online, a Romanian shipping aggregator that books all major local couriers through one API. Agents compare shipping prices, create orders, retrieve AWB labels, and check order status and account balance so multi-courier shipping runs from a single flow.
What This Integration Enables
Colete Online is not a courier. It is a buyer of couriers, and that distinction is the whole reason to use this connector instead of, or alongside, a direct carrier account. List Shipping Services returns the couriers enabled on your account, which in Romania means names like Fan Courier, Cargus, DPD, SameDay, and GLS sitting behind one set of credentials. Get Shipping Prices then quotes a real parcel against a real destination across those services and hands back competing offers. Create Order buys one. A shop that ships 40 parcels a day to mixed urban and rural addresses is making 40 small purchasing decisions, and this is the connector that lets an agent gather the evidence for each one instead of defaulting to whichever carrier the shop signed with first.
The address tooling is unusually deep for an aggregator, and it exists because a broker cannot afford an address that only some of its couriers recognize. Search Countries, Search Localities, Search Cities, and Search Streets walk the hierarchy down to a street the couriers know. Get Postal Code resolves a code from a street, Reverse Postal Code Lookup goes the other way and fills a whole address from a code alone, and Validate Postal Code confirms that a code, street, city, and county are mutually consistent. Get Saved Addresses reads the account address book so repeat senders and recipients are referenced rather than restated.
The rest is the shipping loop and the money behind it. Create Order returns a unique identifier, Get Order Status follows the parcel through to delivery, and Get AWB Label retrieves the printable label in the layout you ask for. List Pickup Point Localities and List Pickup Points cover the locker and courier office network for point delivery, which in Romania is a large and growing share of last mile. Get Account Balance reads the prepaid balance the whole thing draws on. There are no triggers, so a flow starts from an order event in the store or from a schedule.
Without FlowRunner
With FlowRunner
Use Case Scenarios
Buying the shipment rather than assigning it
An order is marked ready to ship in WooCommerce or Magento. The agent resolves the recipient address with Search Cities and Search Streets, confirms it with Validate Postal Code, then calls Get Shipping Prices with the package weight and dimensions and the Service IDs the shop is willing to use. Back come competing offers. For the large majority of orders, where the offers are close and the destination is ordinary, the flow books the best one with Create Order, calls Get AWB Label, and drops the label into the packing queue. The interesting part is the minority: a fragile item, a high value parcel, a village the cheapest courier serves poorly. Those the agent routes to a person with the offer list attached, and the choice gets made by someone who knows the product.
Letting the customer choose where the parcel waits
Point delivery is a real preference in Romania, not a fallback. When a customer selects locker or office pickup at checkout, the agent calls List Pickup Point Localities for the point delivery services on the account to find which localities near the address have points at all, then List Pickup Points for the county to get the actual lockers and offices. The list goes back to the storefront or to a WhatsApp message so the customer picks the point they actually walk past, rather than the one nearest the pin on a map. The chosen point goes into Create Order. A pickup point the customer chose gets collected; a pickup point an algorithm chose gets returned.
A prepaid balance that stops the line before the couriers do
Because orders are charged against a prepaid account, an empty balance is a full stop on dispatch, and it tends to arrive on the busiest day. On a schedule the agent calls Get Account Balance, compares it against the shipping spend of the last comparable period, and posts a projected days of cover figure into Slack. Below a threshold it raises an automation exception naming the shortfall rather than a generic low balance warning. Separately, every Create Order run reads the balance first, so a batch that would exhaust the account stops with parcels still bookable rather than halfway through, leaving a clean set to resume rather than a partially shipped one to untangle.
Human-in-Loop Highlight
The gate here sits on a default, which makes it easy to miss and worth being explicit about. Create Order accepts a list of courier Service IDs to consider, and by default it selects the best price offer among them. That is a sensible default and it is also a purchasing policy the agent would be applying silently, order after order, on someone else's behalf. Cheapest is right most of the time. It is wrong for the fragile item where one courier's handling reputation matters more than four lei. It is wrong for the rural address where the cheap carrier's rural service is the reason the last three complaints happened. And it is wrong for the customer who already had one parcel go missing with that courier and told you about it.
So the agent gathers and proposes rather than deciding by default. It calls Get Shipping Prices for the actual parcel, ranks the offers, and reads Get Account Balance. Four conditions send it to a person rather than to Create Order:
- the declared value is above a threshold the business set
- the item is flagged fragile
- the destination is on the watch list
- the spread between the cheapest offer and the preferred courier is smaller than a set amount
When any of them holds, it stops and asks in Slack: "Order 8842, Vaslui county, 2.4 kg, declared 1,450 lei. Cheapest offer 19 lei, preferred courier 23 lei. Prepaid balance 1,120 lei. Which courier?" Everything else books itself. That is human-in-the-loop used the way Orchestration as a Service intends: the agent handles the volume and a person owns the exceptions where judgment about a customer beats a price comparison.
One structural point about this connector deserves a decision rather than a gate. Colete Online brokers several of the same couriers this catalog also connects to directly, including Cargus, DPD Romania, and Sameday. Going through the aggregator buys you comparison and one integration; going direct buys you the carrier's own depth, meaning Cargus pickup order management, Sameday locker selection, DPD Romania cash on delivery and address validation. Plenty of operations run both, using the aggregator for price sensitive volume and a direct account for the lane where the carrier relationship matters. Decide that deliberately at design time, because it is much harder to unpick once labels are printing.
Agent Capabilities
16 actionsAddress Lookup
7- Search Countries Searches the countries Colete Online supports for shipping and returns their ISO codes, which sender and recipient addresses require.
- Search Localities Searches towns and communes within a country by name. The step that resolves a recipient's locality to something the couriers recognize before an order exists.
- Search Cities Searches cities within a specific country and county. Narrowing by county returns more precise matches than a locality search and is the better call when the county is already known.
- Search Streets Searches streets within a city and county by name, resolving the exact street the couriers expect. Better address validation and better postal code lookups both follow from this.
- Get Postal Code Looks up the postal code for a street within a city and county. An accurate postal code improves both courier availability and pricing accuracy.
- Validate Postal Code Confirms that a postal code matches a given street, city, and county. The cheap check to run before creating an order, since a rejected shipment costs more than a lookup.
- Reverse Postal Code Lookup Resolves a postal code into its city, county, and streets. The inverse of Get Postal Code, and the fast path to a complete address when a customer supplied only the code.
Addresses
1- Get Saved Addresses Retrieves the address book stored on the account. Reusable sender and recipient addresses referenced by ID instead of re-entered, which removes a whole class of typing errors from repeat shipments.
Shipping Services
1- List Shipping Services Lists the courier services available on the account, each with the numeric ID used in the Service IDs parameter of Get Shipping Prices, Create Order, and the pickup point operations. The read that tells a flow which carriers it is allowed to buy from.
Orders
4- Get Shipping Prices Returns price quotes from the couriers for a shipment without creating anything. Supply sender and recipient addresses plus package details, and optionally restrict the quote to specific Service IDs. This is the comparison step, and it is free.
- Create Order Creates a shipping order and buys the AWB from the selected courier. By default the best price offer among the supplied Service IDs is selected. Returns the unique order identifier used for status and label retrieval.
- Get Order Status Retrieves current status and tracking for an existing order by its identifier. The poll behind following a parcel from pickup through to delivery.
- Get AWB Label Retrieves the printable shipping label for an order, with the format type controlling the layout, for example a full A4 page or a smaller label. Returns the label document data from Colete Online.
Pickup Points
2- List Pickup Point Localities Lists the localities that have pickup points, meaning lockers or courier offices, available for a given shipment and set of point delivery Service IDs. Use the returned counties to fetch the actual points.
- List Pickup Points Lists the individual lockers and courier offices in a county for a point delivery shipment. These are the options a recipient chooses between, so this is the list worth showing a customer rather than picking for them.
Account
1- Get Account Balance Retrieves the current prepaid balance on the account. Orders are charged against it, which makes this the read that decides whether a dispatch batch can run to completion.
Frequently Asked Questions
What can FlowRunner do with Colete Online?
FlowRunner agents can run Search Countries, Search Localities, and Search Cities in Colete Online, plus 13 more actions.
Does connecting Colete Online to FlowRunner require OAuth?
Colete Online uses a custom authentication method to connect to FlowRunner.
Can Colete Online trigger a FlowRunner workflow automatically?
Colete Online doesn't currently expose triggers in FlowRunner. It connects as an action step inside workflows started by another trigger.
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