# Ship orders
You connect your own courier account. Mercemur books against it, so the rates, the
wallet and the relationship with the courier stay yours.
**Weight is the number that costs you money.** A courier quotes on the weight you
declare and bills the difference once it weighs the parcel itself. Mercemur refuses
to book a parcel with no weight rather than sending a zero, because a zero is quoted
cheerfully and charged back later.
## Connect a provider
1. Open **Settings → Shipping & fulfillment → Shipping Providers** and connect
Shiprocket with a dedicated API user, not your dashboard login.
2. Paste the webhook URL and token into the provider's own settings. Shiprocket calls
the token optional. Mercemur does not: updates without it are refused, so tracking
would silently never arrive.
3. Open the connection and choose **Map locations**, then match each of your
warehouses to a pickup address the provider has verified. A parcel cannot be booked
from a warehouse with no match, and nothing is guessed for you.
## Set a default parcel
On the **Shipping Providers** page, the **Shipping preferences** card takes a default
weight in grams and, if you want, a default box in millimetres.
The units are in the field labels and they are not negotiable. Your product catalogue
records weights without a unit anywhere, so nothing can tell 1.2 kg from 1.2 g, and a
guess here is billed back to you. Automatic dispatch has no other source for it, since
nobody is present to type one.
## Dispatch a parcel
Dispatching is two steps, and they are separate because only the second one spends
money.
1. **Reserve.** Choose a provider and the warehouse it leaves from, and enter the
parcel if it differs from your default. This creates the order with your provider
and costs nothing.
2. **Choose a courier.** You see the quotes and pick one. This buys the label.
One order can hold one outbound booking at a time. A second attempt is refused
rather than creating a duplicate order in your provider's dashboard, because that
would mean two labels to pay for and, if both were committed, two couriers arriving.
Cancel the first if you meant to rebook.
## Correct a booking before collection
All three corrections keep the AWB the shopper is already tracking, and none of them
work once the courier has the parcel.
The most common reason a parcel fails, and it costs you both legs when it comes
back. Your provider replaces the whole address rather than merging it, so every
field is sent as it stands.
Moves which of your warehouses the parcel is collected from, without cancelling.
Correcting a heavier box now is cheaper than the adjustment your provider bills
after weighing it. Outbound and returning parcels are corrected separately.
## Refuse delivery to some pincodes
Your couriers will quote for anywhere they serve. **Pincodes you do not deliver to**,
on the connection page, is your own refusal on top of that, so an order to a blocked
pincode never goes out.
Blocking asks for confirmation and names the count, because it stops every future order
to those pincodes and a shopper simply sees that you do not ship there. Allowing a
pincode again is one click.
## Hand over to the courier
**Settings → Shipping & fulfillment → Courier Handover** lists everything booked and
not yet collected. Select what is going out and print:
- the **manifest**, which the courier signs for the parcels they take
- the **labels and invoices**, as one PDF rather than a file per parcel
One document covers one provider, because your provider produces it from its own
records. A selection spanning two is refused before you print rather than after.
## Returns and exchanges
A **return** books a courier to collect a parcel back. An **exchange** does that and
sends the replacement out, arranged together so neither can happen without the other.
An exchange asks for two parcels, because the replacement is often a different size
from the one coming back and one set of numbers under-declares the larger.
Both are refused if the order already has a collection booked, so a courier is never
sent twice for the same parcel.
## When something looks wrong
**Settings → Shipping & fulfillment → Shipping Exceptions** collects the three reads
your provider holds about your account. The fourth is on the order itself.
What the courier could not deliver and why, with the shopper's phone number,
because ringing them is usually the next step.
Adjustments already debited against your provider wallet. Each one is a parcel
that was declared lighter than it weighed.
Money moving between you and your provider, including the cash a courier collected
on a COD parcel. It says so when it is showing only the most recent part.
On the order, under its shipments: your provider's own record of a parcel, read
live. Useful when tracking has stalled or a charge looks wrong, since it can
disagree with Mercemur.
If a parcel goes quiet, Mercemur asks your provider about it rather than waiting for a
webhook that may never arrive. A webhook pasted wrongly, or a toggle left off, fails
silently otherwise: the parcel moves and the shopper's page does not.