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GLS contract activation (Germany/Austria/Belgium/France) 🇩🇪🇦🇹🇧🇪🇫🇷

Team Sendcloud
  • Updated

Topic: If you have your own GLS contract, you can connect it with Sendcloud in just a few steps.

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Step 1: Activate your Sendcloud Subscription

Sendcloud offers 3 different subscriptions with which you can use your own contract: Lite, Growth, and the Premium Plan.

For more information regarding which plan is best for you and the needs of your business, you can always contact us via the support section of your Sendcloud account or click here.

Step 2: Obtain your credentials

In order to successfully connect your own GLS contract, the following data is required:

  • Username: The WebAPI Username is provided by your GLS contact person. Usually, it starts with your Customer-ID and ends with “-api” (e.g. 2761234567-api).

  • Password: The password is provided by your GLS contact person. This is a different password than the one in your GLS portal, which starts with “YourGLS”. 

  • Contact-ID: Your customer-ID is your shipping point number used for pickups. Your contact-ID consists of 10 characters (e.g. 276a165X14) 

  • Customer-ID: Your customer-ID is mainly used for invoice issues. Please note, this is not the 2- to 9-digit GLS Gepard customer number. Your customer-ID is consists of 10 numbers (e.g. 2764200001). Note: if you get this error (An error occurred when validating input: The provided shipper is not allowed to create shipments), please make sure to check your Customer-ID.

.You can also add the following keys (optional for Germany*): 

  • Customs-API Key: API Key and API Secret are needed to be set if you want to transfer customs data to GLS. To get your API Key and Secret, open the GLS developer portal and follow the “Get Started” instructions (enable the Customs API). Your customs-API usually looks like: Abc1dE2fgHi4JKLMn5oPuvw6XYz

  • Customs-API Secret: API Key and API Secret are needed to be set if you want to transfer customs data to GLS. To get your API Key and Secret, open the GLS developer portal and follow the “Get Started” instructions (enable the Customs API). Your Customs-API Secret usually looks like: 0A1b2Cd3eFG4hIj5

*Please note: that these fields are optional and only mandatory for shipments to non-EU countries and do not need to be filled in for standard shipping. These keys are self-created via https://dev-portal.gls-group.net/ as described in this article: How to ship to the UK with GLS Germany (DE). Your credentials must be based on the GLS Web API / Shipments-API—credentials for the ‘Ship-it' API are not supported.

 Step 3: Activate your contract in Sendcloud

  1. Log in to your Sendcloud account.
  2. Navigate to Settings > Carriers & Pricing
  3. Find GLS in the list of available carriers for Austria or Germany and click Enable own contract
  4. Enter the information you obtained in Step 2 into the correct fields, and click Save

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Important: In order for the GLS contract to be successfully connected, you require access to the web service API from GLS.

Once you have activated the plan and connected your own contract, you can
start shipping. The available shipping methods for your GLS contract are automatically added to your Sendcloud.

Important: Since your contract and the relevant shipping methods are individual, please make sure that the shipping methods you have agreed upon are activated within your account. Please note that this does not happen automatically. If you do not see the shipping methods, please contact our support / live chat.