Where do you think AI could help with managing inventory?

Some ideas that come to mind are suggesting reorder quantities, flagging unusual stock movements, or answering questions like “Which items haven’t sold in the last 90 days?”

What inventory task takes up your time or causes headaches that you’d want AI to help with? If you’ve tried any AI features in inventory software, were they actually useful?

Hey folks! I’ve been building C2W Inventory, a web-based inventory system, and I’d love some people to try it and tell me what’s confusing, clunky, or just plain bad.

It includes item and stock management, purchase orders and receiving, sales orders and picking, customer/vendor records, and a shareable showroom for collecting quote requests. It works on desktop and mobile.

Getting started is simple: go to the login page, click Sign Up, fill in the information, and start your journey. You’ll get a free 14-day trial.

I’m especially interested in feedback from small businesses, warehouse folks, and anyone who has wrestled with inventory software:

• What did you expect to find but couldn’t?
• Which workflow made you stop and think?
• What feels unnecessary or overcomplicated?
• What would make you trust—or not trust—it with real inventory?

Please be honest; constructive roasting is very welcome. I’m building this iteratively and would rather hear “this part makes no sense” now than polish the wrong thing.

Try it here: app.c2wtechnology.com

I've been comparing package tracking APIs recently, specifically for cases where you mainly need the API and don't necessarily need a full post-purchase platform.

AfterShip is obviously one of the bigger options, but it includes a lot more than just tracking: branded tracking pages, notifications, analytics, returns, etc. That's useful if you need the whole platform, but it can be more than necessary if your main requirement is simply getting tracking data into your own application.

From what I've looked at, the alternatives seem to fall into a few different groups:

TrackingMore / 17TRACK — make sense if broad international carrier coverage is important.

EasyPost / Shippo — probably a better fit if you also need shipping labels, rates, and other shipping APIs.

Direct carrier APIs — can work if you're only dealing with one or two carriers, but once you have FedEx + UPS + USPS + DHL, maintaining all those integrations gets complicated pretty quickly.

This is actually one of the reasons we built Package Tracking API by C2W. We're focusing more narrowly on the tracking API itself, especially for businesses that mainly need major carriers and higher tracking volumes. The idea is to keep the cost lower rather than bundling tracking with a larger post-purchase platform.

Obviously I'm biased since it's our product, but researching the market while building it made me curious about what other developers are actually using.

I put together a more detailed comparison here:

Package Tracking API by C2W:
https://PackageTrackingAPI.com

For anyone doing a decent amount of package tracking, what are you using now? And what ended up mattering most when you chose it: price, carrier coverage, API reliability, tracking frequency, or something else?

I've been comparing package tracking APIs recently, specifically for cases where you mainly need the API and don't necessarily need a full post-purchase platform.

AfterShip is obviously one of the bigger options, but it includes a lot more than just tracking: branded tracking pages, notifications, analytics, returns, etc. That's useful if you need the whole platform, but it can be more than necessary if your main requirement is simply getting tracking data into your own application.

From what I've looked at, the alternatives seem to fall into a few different groups:

TrackingMore / 17TRACK — make sense if broad international carrier coverage is important.

EasyPost / Shippo — probably a better fit if you also need shipping labels, rates, and other shipping APIs.

Direct carrier APIs — can work if you're only dealing with one or two carriers, but once you have FedEx + UPS + USPS + DHL, maintaining all those integrations gets complicated pretty quickly.

This is actually one of the reasons we built Package Tracking API by C2W. We're focusing more narrowly on the tracking API itself, especially for businesses that mainly need major carriers and higher tracking volumes. The idea is to keep the cost lower rather than bundling tracking with a larger post-purchase platform.

Obviously I'm biased since it's our product, but researching the market while building it made me curious about what other developers are actually using.

I put together a more detailed comparison here:

Package Tracking API by C2W:
https://PackageTrackingAPI.com

For anyone doing a decent amount of package tracking, what are you using now? And what ended up mattering most when you chose it: price, carrier coverage, API reliability, tracking frequency, or something else?

I've been comparing package tracking APIs recently, specifically for cases where you mainly need the API and don't necessarily need a full post-purchase platform.

AfterShip is obviously one of the bigger options, but it includes a lot more than just tracking: branded tracking pages, notifications, analytics, returns, etc. That's useful if you need the whole platform, but it can be more than necessary if your main requirement is simply getting tracking data into your own application.

From what I've looked at, the alternatives seem to fall into a few different groups:

TrackingMore / 17TRACK — make sense if broad international carrier coverage is important.

EasyPost / Shippo — probably a better fit if you also need shipping labels, rates, and other shipping APIs.

Direct carrier APIs — can work if you're only dealing with one or two carriers, but once you have FedEx + UPS + USPS + DHL, maintaining all those integrations gets complicated pretty quickly.

This is actually one of the reasons we built Package Tracking API by C2W. We're focusing more narrowly on the tracking API itself, especially for businesses that mainly need major carriers and higher tracking volumes. The idea is to keep the cost lower rather than bundling tracking with a larger post-purchase platform.

Obviously I'm biased since it's our product, but researching the market while building it made me curious about what other developers are actually using.

I put together a more detailed comparison here:

Package Tracking API by C2W:
https://PackageTrackingAPI.com

For anyone doing a decent amount of package tracking, what are you using now? And what ended up mattering most when you chose it: price, carrier coverage, API reliability, tracking frequency, or something else?

Not sure how many developers here have run into this yet, but USPS tracking data has become a lot more difficult to access since the new tracking access controls went into effect on April 1, 2026.

The biggest issue seems to be when you're trying to track USPS packages that weren't generated under your own MID.

If you're only tracking your own shipments, the USPS API still makes sense. But for software platforms that receive tracking numbers from different customers, it's a different story. Those packages can be associated with many different MIDs.

For service providers, getting access to tracking data for other MIDs can involve authorization, an EPS account, an Order Form, an IP Agreement with USPS, Business Portal permissions, and additional tracking data fees.

That's a lot of overhead if all your application really needs to do is take a USPS tracking number and return its current status.

It also creates a problem for things like ecommerce software, order management systems, 3PL platforms, customer service tools, etc., because you often don't even know where the customer originally purchased the USPS label.

We've been dealing with this from the tracking API side at C2W, and it's definitely made USPS more complicated compared with UPS/FedEx.

For anyone dealing with the same issue, I'm curious what approach you're taking:

1. Going through the USPS approval/access process?
2. Using a third-party tracking API?
3. Using another workaround?

We provide USPS tracking through Package Tracking API by C2W, so obviously we're approaching it from the third-party API side, but I'm particularly interested in hearing how other developers are handling the USPS changes.

Hey everyone,

I currently run a B2B package tracking API (supporting UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL). I’ve been talking to several e-commerce brands and developers who use platforms like AfterShip, and a recurring pain point keeps coming up: cost and feature bloat.

Most mid-sized merchants already have their own transactional email or SMS stacks (Klaviyo, SendGrid, Postmark, Twilio, etc.). They don’t need AfterShip to host drag-and-drop email templates, manage deliverability, or act as an all-in-one marketing suite—they just want clean, reliable tracking data piped into their own systems.

So, I’m planning to build a developer-first, "headless" alternative using .NET/Blazor designed to do one thing exceptionally well: normalize multi-carrier tracking and fire precise webhooks.

How I plan to structure it:

1. Order Import API: Push tracking numbers and order IDs via a simple REST endpoint.
2. Event-Driven Subscriptions: Choose exact lifecycle events to track (e.g., Label Created, In Transit, Out for Delivery, Delivered, Exception).
3. Bring Your Own Provider (BYOP): Instead of paying for bundled email sending or rigid UI hosting, our backend fires secure JSON webhooks directly to your endpoint. Your backend handles the notification however you want.

Why go this route?

• Drastically Lower Cost: By cutting out email hosting, templates, and UI layers, I can pass those savings on to the clients instead of charging enterprise software suites prices.
• Zero Integration Friction for Devs: If you already have an event-driven notification architecture, you just catch the webhook and trigger your existing SendGrid/Klaviyo flow. No learning a proprietary builder.
• No Deliverability Nightmares: Clients control their own sender reputation and domains.

Before I start writing code and building out the MVP, I’d love some brutal feedback from this community:

• If you run or build for e-commerce, would a "headless/webhook-only" tracking provider appeal to you, or do you strictly need the vendor to handle the consumer-facing tracking page and emails?
• What’s your biggest frustration with current tracking APIs on the market today?

Roast the concept, poke holes in the model, or let me know if this solves a pain point for you!

Has anyone been affected by the USPS tracking data access controls that were implemented on April 1, 2026?