Connect HFD for deliveries in Israel

HFD is an Israeli delivery company. Once connected, Brainerce can create the shipment with HFD when an order is paid, fetch the label, put the tracking number on the order, follow the parcel until it is delivered, and close the order when it arrives. HFD invoices you directly under your own contract. Brainerce never charges you for the delivery.

What you need before you start

1. A customer number from HFD (up to 8 digits).
2. An API token from HFD for that customer number. Ask HFD for it. It is valid for two years.
3. A short company name (up to 10 characters). HFD prints it on every shipment.
4. Your pickup address registered with HFD. HFD collects parcels from the address in your contract with it. Brainerce does not ask you for a ship-from address when you connect HFD, and a store with no warehouse address can still buy HFD labels.

Ask HFD to switch on cancelling for your account at the same time. It is a permission they grant per customer. Without it you can still create deliveries, but cancelling one from Brainerce is refused and you have to cancel it with HFD.

Connect HFD

1. Open Apps, choose the Shipping tab, and install HFD.
2. Enter your customer number, your token and your company name.
3. Leave Environment on Live. Test is HFD's sandbox and creates no real deliveries. HFD gives you a separate token for each, so a Test token only works with Test selected.
4. Brainerce checks the token with HFD before it saves. If the token belongs to a different customer number, it tells you which one. If HFD accepts the token in the other environment, it tells you to switch Environment.
5. Check the connection. HFD collects from the address in your contract, so there is no "Where you ship from" step for HFD.

Every HFD setting

HFD takes no package size: it prices by contract, so there is no size or dimension setting for it.

What the customer pays

HFD does not publish prices that Brainerce can read: your price is a contract between you and HFD. So what a customer pays at checkout comes from your own Zones & Rates, exactly as for any store without a live-rate carrier. See Set up shipping zones and rates. HFD never adds a price option of its own to checkout.

Buying the label

By hand. Press Buy label on the Shipping page, or press Create Label in the Shipping label box of the order's summary, and pick HFD. There is no price next to it, because HFD invoices you later under your contract.

Automatically. On Shipping, press the carrier pill at the top and use Automatic labels: Off, I buy each label myself, 30 minutes after payment (recommended) or Right after payment. The recommended mode, which a new HFD connection starts on, waits 30 minutes after payment (you can change the minutes, 1 to 1440), which is your window to cancel a wrong order or fix an address before anything is sent to HFD. Nothing is ever bought automatically for an order that was cancelled, refunded, collected in person, already shipped by hand, or has no physical items.

If HFD refuses an automatic shipment, the order does not stop. A failed shipment appears on Shipping → Overview with HFD's own reason. The common ones:

• HFD does not recognise the city or street. HFD matches Hebrew spellings, and its own address list does not recognise an English spelling of a city or street that it knows in Hebrew. Write the city and street in Hebrew on the order and buy the label again.
• No price for this delivery area or shipment type. Your HFD contract does not cover it. Ask HFD.
• The recipient has no phone number. HFD's courier calls the customer, so a phone number is required. Add it to the order and buy the label again. Make your checkout ask for a phone number: the starter store from create-brainerce-store shows the field but does not make it mandatory, and a store built another way may not ask at all.

Cash on delivery

HFD's courier can collect payment at the door, but only when Brainerce tells HFD the amount and a payment code that HFD gives you. Brainerce knows an order is cash on delivery from its payment method (for example an order you create in the dashboard with the payment method Cash on delivery). A normal checkout on your storefront is paid online and never needs this. So for an order that is not paid and has the payment method cash on delivery:

• Brainerce refuses to book it with HFD until you enter the Cash on delivery payment code in the HFD settings. This is on purpose: without it the courier would deliver the parcel and collect nothing.
• The order must be in Israeli shekels (ILS). HFD collects only shekels. An order created in the dashboard defaults to USD unless you chose a currency, and Brainerce refuses it and tells you the order's currency.
• What the courier collects is the amount still owed. If a gift card paid part of the order, only the rest is collected.
• HFD books a collection as a different shipment type from a plain delivery. Brainerce uses HFD's documented codes (37 and 100) unless you changed them under Advanced.
• Cash only. HFD can also collect a cheque, but Brainerce does not offer it: it sends the cash code you set.
• Not together with a pickup point. HFD has no shipment type that both collects payment and delivers to a pickup point, so an order that needs both is refused. Change it to a home delivery.

Buy the label BEFORE you mark the order as paid. Once an order is marked paid, Brainerce treats it as paid and tells HFD to collect nothing, so the courier would hand the parcel over without taking the money. For cash on delivery: buy the label first, and use Mark as Paid only after HFD has collected and passed the money on to you. See Process an order.

Bank transfer is not cash on delivery: HFD collects nothing for it.

Pickup points

Customers can choose to collect their parcel from an HFD pickup point near them instead of at the door. HFD publishes the list of its points, with the opening hours as text, and Brainerce shows only points that take parcels.

HFD pickup points are new in Brainerce and HFD's own test environment lists none, so place one test order to a pickup point and follow it to delivery before you offer the option widely.

To offer it, add a delivery rate that goes to a pickup point. In Shipping, open the zone, add or edit a rate, and switch on Deliver to a carrier pickup point. Give that rate its own price: it is a separate choice from home delivery, and the customer pays what you set on it, not an HFD price.

• At checkout the customer picks the rate, then picks a point from a list of the nearest ones, with its address, opening hours and distance. They cannot pay until a point is chosen.
• An English city name finds nothing in HFD's list, because HFD's list is in Hebrew. When the storefront knows where the customer is, Brainerce ranks HFD's whole network by distance instead, so an English storefront still shows the nearest points. Without that location, only a Hebrew city name narrows the list.
• The list is HFD's own. Brainerce keeps it for at most 6 hours. If HFD cannot be reached the customer sees an error with a retry button, not "no point near you".
• The label goes to the point. On the order, under Carrier pickup point, you see it. The address above it is still the customer's own, and the parcel is delivered to the point.
• Only HFD can fulfil it. The parcel is booked with the same app that listed the point. If you disconnect HFD, an order that chose a point cannot get a label until you change the order to a home delivery.
• A storefront needs the screen. The Brainerce starter shows the point picker. A storefront built earlier, by hand or by an AI assistant, does not show this rate at all, even with the switch on and HFD connected, until its developer adds the picker and declares it (features: ['pickup-points'] on the SDK client). It keeps working exactly as before in the meantime.
• With HFD disconnected the rate is never shown. The switch on the rate does nothing by itself: a connected shipping app that lists pickup points for the customer's country is required.
• No pickup point near the customer, no rate. When HFD answers with an empty list for the customer's address, the pickup point rate is not offered to that customer, because they could not choose a point and pay. The rate comes back as soon as HFD lists a point there; Brainerce keeps an answer for up to 10 minutes. If HFD cannot be reached, the rate is still offered and the customer sees the error with a retry button.
• HFD's test environment lists no points, so in test the rate never appears. Connect with the Production environment to see real points. In Test, HFD still accepts a booking to a point you name, but Brainerce has no point to show a customer.
• Only one shipping app lists points for a country. If you also connected Cheetah, the app with the higher priority (then the one connected first) provides the points and HFD's are not shown next to them. Disconnect the other app, or give HFD the higher priority, to offer HFD points.
• HFD books a delivery to a point as its own shipment type (50 with cargo type 11 unless you changed them under Advanced). If HFD refuses the point, the order says so and you ask the customer for another point or change it to a home delivery.

Where HFD collects from

Brainerce does not send a pickup address with an HFD shipment, so HFD collects from whatever address it holds for your account: confirm with HFD which address that is before your first shipment. A warehouse address in Brainerce does not change where HFD collects, and an order allocated to a different warehouse is still collected from the same HFD address. If you ship from more than one place, or you move, ask HFD to change it. Brainerce cannot tell HFD which of your addresses a given order leaves from. Your warehouse addresses are still used by other carriers you connect.

Label and tracking

The tracking number appears on the order as soon as HFD accepts the shipment. The label is saved by Brainerce, so you can print it from the Print label link.

If HFD accepted the shipment but the label has not arrived yet, the row says Label not ready and offers Get label. The shipment is already booked, so nothing is lost: press it again in a minute.

Brainerce asks HFD about open shipments about every half hour on the first day, then every couple of hours, then every few hours as the parcel gets older, because an HFD parcel does not change state every few minutes. When HFD reports the parcel delivered, the order is marked Completed and the customer gets the delivered email. A parcel HFD reports lost, damaged or sent back to you appears under Needs attention on Shipping → Overview as The carrier reported a problem with this parcel, with HFD's reason when it gave one. The order is not changed for you: contact HFD, then cancel, refund or re-ship the order yourself.

Cancelling a shipment

You can cancel until the HFD driver picks the parcel up. If HFD refuses, Brainerce tells you in HFD's words and the shipment stays as it was. If it says cancelling is not enabled for your account, ask HFD to enable it.

What HFD does not do in Brainerce

• No cheque collection on delivery. Cash only.
• No cash on delivery outside Israel or in another currency. Shekels only.
• No return labels.
• No size-based cargo types. Brainerce sends the one cargo type you set (and HFD's pickup point and collection types where they apply); it does not pick a larger type for a larger parcel.
• Israel only. An order to any other country never goes to HFD.
• No live price quotes. See above.

Using HFD with another carrier

You can install more than one shipping app. When two of them can deliver to the same address, the one with the lower Priority number buys automatically; with no priority set, the carrier you installed first does. Give HFD priority 1 to have it handle Israeli orders. Pickup points work the same way: when both HFD and Cheetah can list pickup points for the customer's country, only ONE of them does, the one with the lower Priority number (the older install when there is none), and the label for a point is bought with that same carrier. The points of the other carrier are not shown. Deliver only to these countries narrows a carrier further, and can only narrow what the carrier offers.

Need help? Email [email protected].