EasyPost
Ship parcels — rate a shipment across carriers, buy a label, track it to the door, verify addresses and file insurance claims.
About
EasyPost ships in the w6w first-party pack. It declares 19 actions, 3 health checks, and the host runs its code in a sandbox that never sees the credential.
- App id
io.w6w.easypost- Version
- 0.1.1
- Author
- w6w
- Licence
- MIT
- Categories
- Commerce & Payments · Developer Tools
Overview
EasyPost rates a parcel across every carrier on an account, buys the label, tracks it to the door, verifies an address before a bad one turns into a costly return, and insures what matters. Rating and buying are deliberately separate steps — quoting a shipment never spends money, and only purchasing a label moves money and issues a tracking code — so a workflow that only wants a price never risks buying one by accident.
Tracking statuses are read for what they actually mean rather than taken at face value: an unscanned parcel reads as unknown rather than lost, and the two statuses that actually need a human’s attention — returned to sender and carrier failure — are flagged explicitly rather than left to blend into everything else. Address verification runs as its own cheap step ahead of purchase, returning the carrier’s corrected version of an address so a mismatch is caught before a label is printed rather than after a parcel comes back.
Beyond shipping, this app can also insure a parcel shipped elsewhere, generate a single scan-form barcode for a batch of packages, and book or cancel a carrier pickup. Managing carrier accounts, configuring webhooks and one-call purchasing are left out, since those are dashboard-level or workflow-antithetical decisions rather than steps in an automation.
Build with EasyPost
Three routes to the same 19 actions. The Workflow tab is generated from EasyPost's own manifest and carries its real ids, so it is copy-pasteable; the Code and CLI examples are the same call for any action on any app, so every app-specific value in them is a blank you fill in.
Create an address
address-create Store an address for reuse without verifying it — for your own warehouse. A customer's address came from a form and should go through `address-verify` instead.
Verify an address
address-verify Check an address exists and get it back as the postal service holds it — standardised, with the full ZIP+4. One call, before a wrong address costs a label and a return.
List carrier accounts
carrier-account-list Which carriers this account can rate against — the usual explanation for an empty rates array. Credentials are redacted by EasyPost, so this is safe to schedule.
List events
event-list Everything EasyPost emitted, webhook or not. The only way to recover updates missed while an endpoint was down — nothing queues them on your side.
Insure a parcel
insurance-create Insure a parcel shipped elsewhere. For labels bought here, insure at purchase instead — and note the window closes: a delivered or missing parcel cannot be insured retroactively.
Create a parcel
parcel-create Describe a box once and reuse its id. Weight is in OUNCES and dimensions in INCHES — nothing validates that, and the carrier bills the real weight afterwards.
Book a pickup
pickup-buy Schedule the collection. This is the step that costs money and sends a driver — until it runs, a pickup is only a quote.
Cancel a pickup
pickup-cancel Call the driver off. A collection booked against a cancelled order still sends one, and carriers charge for the wasted trip — so this belongs early, not on the morning.
Request a pickup quote
pickup-create Ask carriers what a collection would cost. This does not book it — `pickup-buy` does, and an unbought pickup means nobody comes.
Create a scan form
scan-form-create One barcode covering a batch of purchased labels, so a carrier accepts the lot in a single scan. Every shipment must be bought and leave from the same address.
Buy postage for a shipment
shipment-buy PURCHASES the label. Money moves, a tracking code is issued, and a refund is a request to the carrier rather than an undo.
Create a shipment and get rates
shipment-create Describe a parcel and get every carrier's price for it. This BUYS NOTHING — no label, no tracking code, nothing owed. `shipment-buy` is the step that spends money.
Get a shipment
shipment-get One shipment. Before purchase it is a quote with rates; after purchase it carries the label and tracking code and the rates are history.
Convert a label's format
shipment-label-format Re-render a purchased label as ZPL, EPL2 or PDF — a thermal printer will not take the PNG a purchase returns.
List shipments
shipment-list Recent shipments. Filtering to the UNPURCHASED ones finds quotes that were abandoned — what a cancelled order leaves behind, which nothing else reports.
Refund a shipment
shipment-refund Ask the carrier to refund the postage. It is a REQUEST — the carrier decides, over days, and rejects labels that were scanned. Not an undo.
Track a parcel
tracker-create Follow a tracking number EasyPost did not issue — a supplier's dispatch, a customer's return. Creating one subscribes to updates, so polling as well is doing the work twice.
Get tracking status
tracker-get Where a parcel is. `unknown` means not yet scanned, not lost — the ones worth acting on are `return_to_sender` and `failure`, and both are otherwise silent.
List trackers
tracker-list Parcels in flight, with the statuses tallied. A label bought and never handed over sits at `pre_transit` forever, costs money, and nothing else reports it.
A workflow step names the app and the action, and the editor fills in the
connection when you pick one. This is the Step shape from the
workflow spec, carrying EasyPost's real ids.
{
"manifestVersion": "2",
"name": "easypost-example",
"steps": [
{
"id": "address-create",
"uses": {
"app": "io.w6w.easypost",
"action": "address-create",
"connection": "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID"
},
"with": {
"street1": "<street1>"
}
}
]
}Here are some of the things you can do
-
Create an address
performaddress-create -
Verify an address
performaddress-verify -
List carrier accounts
readcarrier-account-list -
List events
readevent-list -
Insure a parcel
performinsurance-create
+14 more actions available
Every app-specific value here is a blank you have to fill in. An
app action is reached through the connection that authenticates it, so the
address is a connection id, not the app id — and connections belong to your account,
so a public page cannot know yours. Create one for EasyPost, then fill in
the three blanks: conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID, the action key, and the
parameters that action declares. The call itself is real — the shape is transcribed
from the studio's own snippet builder, which prints the same kind of blanks — but
nothing in it is specific to EasyPost. The Workflow tab is where this app's
real ids are.
npm install @w6w/sdkyarn add @w6w/sdkpnpm add @w6w/sdkdeno add npm:@w6w/sdkimport { W6wClient, isActionRun } from "@w6w/sdk";
// Reads W6W_BASE_URL and W6W_TOKEN from the environment when omitted.
const client = new W6wClient();
const envelope = await client.run({
urn: "conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID",
action: "address-create",
payload: {
// name: "<value>",
// company: "<value>",
street1: "<value>",
// street2: "<value>",
// city: "<value>",
// state: "<value>",
// zip: "<value>",
// country: "<value>",
// phone: "<value>",
// email: "<value>",
// residential: "<value>",
},
});
if (isActionRun(envelope)) console.log(envelope.value);npm install -g @w6w/cliw6w run conn_YOUR_CONNECTION_ID --action address-create --payload '{"street1":"<value>"}'Give an AI agent EasyPost — without giving it EasyPost's credentials. One MCP endpoint exposes every app, function and workflow the caller is entitled to, as tools it can discover and run. Access is granted per team while we onboard.
One tool call{
"name": "w6w_invoke",
"arguments": {
"ref": "app:io.w6w.easypost#address-create",
"input": {
"street1": "<street1>"
}
}
}
Every tool names its target with a single ref. The
app: form above doesn't name a connection at all — the
host resolves which of the caller's EasyPost connections to sign
with, and refuses rather than guesses when the answer is ambiguous.
What the agent gets
Credentials it can't read
The token is attached host-side, at the moment of the call. It is never a tool argument, never in the model's context, and never in a transcript — so a prompt injection has nothing to exfiltrate.
A tool surface scoped to the caller
Tools are derived per end user from what that person has actually connected and is entitled to — not one shared bot identity carrying the union of everyone's access.
A durable workflow in one call
Multi-step work runs on the workflow engine and returns a run handle the agent can poll — retries, branching and state survive the conversation that started them.
Health-aware discovery
EasyPost's declared health checks are on the surface too, so an agent can tell "the vendor is down" from "your credential expired" before it burns a retry on either.
The MCP surface is part of the hosted platform. EasyPost itself is MIT, and the runtime that executes it is source-available (FSL).
Health checks
EasyPost declares its own checks, so its health is a property of the app rather than something the host guesses at.
EasyPost platform status
EasyPost's own API, label purchasing and tracking. Carrier outages are reported by name but do not count — when UPS is down, EasyPost is fine and you buy a different rate.
Account and environment
Whether this connection's account answers, and whether its key is test or production — a test key succeeds at everything and buys nothing, which no credential check can see.