Overview
CollectHub is a B2B logistics product that helps merchants create and manage shipments across external carriers.
What looks like a simple shipping workflow on the surface depends on carrier-specific requirements, customer configuration, API behaviour, tracking, billing and, for international shipments, customs documentation.
My role was to help translate that complexity into clear product workflows, technical requirements and operational processes that merchants and internal teams could actually use.
A second challenge was scalability: onboarding a new customer should not require Engineering to manually configure every account.
- Merchant configuration
- Carrier requirements
- Shipment data
- API integration
- Labels
- Tracking
- Billing
- Error handling
- Customs data for international shipping
What sits behind one button.
My role
My role covered both the merchant-facing product experience and the operational and technical workflows behind it.
- Shipment and label workflows
- Tracking, cancellations and returns
- Pickup and scheduled-pickup behaviour
- Merchant onboarding and configuration
- Carrier requirements and API behaviour
- Bulk / CSV shipment creation
- Billing and shipping-cost visibility
- International shipping and customs requirements
- QA and production rollout
- External carrier coordination
I worked closely with Engineering and external providers on request/response behaviour, required fields, credentials, mappings, provider limitations, edge cases and QA.
How I approached it
Standardise the experience without hiding necessary complexity
Different carriers require different data, credentials and behaviours. The product should absorb as much of that complexity as possible, so merchants don’t need to understand each carrier’s technical requirements.
Make onboarding scalable
If every new customer needs Engineering to configure credentials, organisation IDs, billing information or carrier settings by hand, the product doesn’t scale. I worked on admin capabilities that let internal teams such as Sales configure customers more independently.
Design for real operational failure
Shipping integrations fail in the real world. The product needs defined behaviour for missing configuration, carrier errors, timeouts and incomplete data, rather than treating them as exceptional edge cases.
Key decisions
- One consistent merchant workflowCarrier-specific differences are handled behind the product wherever possible, rather than pushed onto the merchant.
- Onboarding should not depend on EngineeringInternal teams configure customers through structured admin workflows instead of relying on developers for every new setup.
- Test the hardest operational scenariosInternational shipments were used to validate the more complex data and documentation requirements before broader rollout.
- Configuration is part of the productCarrier credentials, customer identifiers, billing information and merchant settings are treated as a defined product workflow, not informal setup work.
- Bulk operations matter in B2BCSV and bulk shipment creation reduce repetitive manual entry for customers with higher shipment volumes.
Technical and operational complexity
International shipping introduced additional complexity because non-EU shipments require structured customs information and documentation, such as:
- Commercial invoices
- Commodity descriptions
- HS codes
- Customs values
- Importer information
- Duties payer
- Tax and customs identifiers
- Electronic Trade Documents
We tested international shipment flows to the UK, Switzerland and the US.
When integrations fail
- Invalid carrier credentials
- Missing merchant configuration
- Provider API errors
- Unexpected responses
- Missing customs information
- Timeouts
- Partial responses
The important product question was not only whether an integration failed, but what information the merchant or internal team needed in order to recover from it.
The commercial and operational side
I also worked on shipping-cost information, carrier quotation data, billing-related configuration and operational status behaviour.
Outcome
The work helped create a more consistent B2B shipping experience across carrier-specific workflows, while making customer onboarding and configuration more scalable.
Merchants could work through a standardised shipment process, internal teams gained clearer tools for customer setup, and Engineering was less involved in repetitive onboarding configuration.
The platform also became better prepared for international shipping, bulk workflows and future system integrations.
What I learned
B2B products often look simple only because the complexity has been handled somewhere else. Good product management means deciding which complexity the product should absorb, which configuration users need to control, and how failures should be made understandable and recoverable.