+4Our firm ships hundreds of packages a week and we currently manually track each URL to watch for updates on transit times/ delivery status. We have tried to prompt an AI agent to open the URL and provide tracking updates but it can’t seem to figure it out. But, I know AI Agents have the capacity to Web Search/scrape.
We have put our prompts into ChatGPT/Claude to get assistance with prompting but it seems like its a limitation of the AI Agent. Can anyone advise? Thank you!
+35Hmmm… I am also unable to get any of the AI tools in Airtable to return shipping tracking information to me. I tested all of Airtable’s different AI tools, and I was unsuccessful.
Must be some sort of Airtable limitation. You may want to open a support ticket at support@airtable.com and/or submit it as a feature request on the product feedback form.
However, you could easily build your own tracking automations by using Make in conjunction with Airtable.
You would just need to signup for a very low cost tracking service such as Shippo’s API-only account (2 cents per tracking request) or ShipStation’s API-only account, and then integrate your chosen service with Airtable by using Make’s Shippo integrations or Make’s ShipStation integrations.
(There are other shipping API tools as well… those are just 2 that popped into my head.)
If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.
For example, here is one of the many different ways that you can instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. You can even instantly trigger a Make automation by having a button or URL link trigger a custom webhook (with optional webhook response).
I give live demonstrations of how to use Make in many of my Airtable podcast appearances. For example, in this video, I show how to work with Airtable arrays in Make. And in this video, I show how to use custom webhooks.
Hope this helps!
If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
+22Depending on who you’re using for shipping and your level of technical expertise, you might be able to do this more manually inside Airtable by calling APIs from automation scripts. A quick googling shows that USPS and Fedex have API documentation available, and this is a good fairly simple project to learn API scripting on.
It reminds me of trying to use Airtable AI to scrape film data from iMDB for my personal movie collection, which just did not want to work consistently. Eventually I figured out that an alternative movie database site (TMDB) has an open API for personal use. Combining their instructions with this sample script I was able to get a script that would call their search API for title+year, and then I added a generate structured data AI action which parses the returning JSON into key/values that I can write into the record.
The other benefits compared to scraping is it’s a lot less AI credit intensive, because you can use a simpler model to parse the data, and it’s a lot more consistent because it’s working in a very limited scope. My setup ends up running 3 times (there are three different API calls per title) and runs out to 41 AI credits which I mathed out to be 8.2 cents per run (if I ever ran it enough that I needed to buy more credits).
+1Been testing this myself actually.
Airtable AI agents aren't really built for real-time tracking out of the box. They work better for automating actions within Airtable itself rather than pulling live data from external shipping APIs.
One workaround I found was using a third-party automation tool to handle the tracking and then pushing updates back into Airtable via webhooks. Or you could use Airtable's scripting block with a custom API call to fetch tracking info on a schedule.
Would be nice if they added native tracking support though. For now it feels like a bit of a hack job.
Anyone else tried something that worked?
+32+1 for
The UPS and FedEx tracking numbers are fairly easy to distinguish and so I used a formula field to parse that
I then have an automation that runs once a day that looks for all the open deliveries (has a tracking number + not marked as ‘Delivered’), and for each of them it’ll query either UPS or FedEx based on the previously mentioned field
Works great and only uses 30 automation runs per month (for up to 8000 deliveries anyway. Once it goes above 8000 I’d need another automation and so it’d use 60 runs per month)
+35What I find so strange about all of this is that if you use ChatGPT independently outside of Airtable, it can very easily retrieve shipping tracking statuses.
But using any of Airtable’s field agents or automation agents based on ChatGPT will not return successful results.
(Claude is unable to retrieve shipping tracking statuses, which may be why Airtable’s Omni can’t do it either.)
- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant
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