Shiptheory uses BigCommerce's API to fetch details about your orders, shipments and products and to update your shipments' statuses and tracking details. Each time BigCommerce sends an update to Shiptheory about a new order or shipment, Shiptheory automatically makes a short succession of quick requests over the API to download all the details required to book a courier delivery.
If you're processing large numbers of orders in BigCommerce in batches, or a number of orders or shipments containing a large number of products simultaneously, it's possible that you might receive an error in Shiptheory similar to "BigCommerce API request limit reached, not enough requests available to complete the shipment." This means that Shiptheory is requesting information from BigCommerce faster than they are able to provide it. Ideally, BigCommerce would prefer a steady stream of requests to its API rather than short bursts of large amounts of simultaneous requests.
Here are a few things you can do to prevent this error -
Change how shipment details are sent to Shiptheory
Shiptheory offers two methods for sending shipment details Shiptheory - automatically as soon as orders are set to a selected status in BigCommerce, or when shipments are created in BigCommerce.
Depending on which option you have already set up in your Shiptheory settings, it may be worth reviewing this to achieve more of a drip feed of shipments from BigCommerce into Shiptheory and prevent large batches of orders from coming across at once.
You can read more about these settings, here: Processing Orders and Shipments from BigCommerce
You can also always get in touch with our support team should you like to discuss your shipping process and how Shiptheory might better fit your needs.
Check your BigCommerce apps
If you use any other apps with your BigCommerce store, they all share your account's API quota between them. Perhaps there are some old, unused apps that it's now time to remove to free up some extra requests?
Increase your BigCommerce API Rate Limit
BigCommerce offers the option to increase the API rate limit for your account (including an unlimited plan) should you require the additional bandwidth. More information is available from BigCommerce, here: https://developer.bigcommerce.com/docs/c722779631be8-app-development-best-practices#respect-api-rate-limits.
Please get in touch with your BigCommerce account manager to discuss options. Shiptheory can not advise on your account's usage of the BigCommerce API
For anything else, just get in touch with our support team!