Important product naming update: Sidekick is now called Gladly (AI) and Gladly Hero (the Platform) is now Gladly Team. Please keep this in mind as you read through our documentation.

Aftership on App Platform Overview

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"Where is my order?" is the single highest-volume question a support team handles, and the answer normally lives in a system the team member cannot see. Gladly’s AfterShip integration surfaces the Customer’s shipments, returns, warranty claims, and order details directly on the Gladly Customer Profile, carrier status, checkpoint history, return windows, refund state, and claim progress – and lets team members move a return or a warranty claim through its lifecycle without leaving the Conversation.

Before you start: agent forms need a separate registration

Installing the app does not put the nine agent actions in the compose menu. The cards appear on the Customer Profile as soon as the configuration is saved, but the forms need one more step, in a different place.

Each form must be registered in Org Manager under Integrations > External App Forms (Actions) – one row per form, where Form is the form’s directory name (getReturnLabel, approveReturn, rejectReturn, resolveReturn, predictDeliveryDate, retrackShipment, approveClaim, rejectClaim, checkClaimResolutions).

Publishing there replaces the whole list, so read the existing rows first and add to them rather than overwriting. If this step is missed, the cards render normally and the compose menu simply has no AfterShip actions in it – which looks identical to an app that does not offer any.

Key benefits

See every shipment, return, and claim at a glance

Four cards render live on the profile: shipments from AfterShip Tracking, returns from the Returns API, warranty claims from the Warranty API, and the order behind each shipment from AfterShip Commerce. Each card sorts most-urgent first, and flags the shipments that need attention – a passed delivery date, a parcel with no carrier scan for weeks, a failed delivery attempt.

Resolve returns end to end

Team members can approve a return and mint the prepaid label, fetch a label for an already-approved return, reject one with a reason, resolve it once the items are back, or send the customer a return-portal deeplink – straight from the Conversation.

Warranty claims, which no competing integration surfaces

Approve a claim, reject it with a reason, or check which resolutions the merchant’s own warranty rules actually permit. Neither Zendesk nor Gorgias exposes AfterShip warranty data or warranty actions at all.

Answer “when will it arrive?” with AfterShip’s own AI

Predict a delivery date on demand for any route, and restart tracking on a shipment AfterShip has stopped polling – the remedy for the stalled parcel the card already detects.

Safety switches on everything that costs money

Return rejection, claim rejection, and claim processing are each disabled by default and refused before any request reaches AfterShip until an administrator turns them on. The gates are enforced in the actions themselves, not only in the forms, so an AI or Workflow caller cannot walk past them.

Supported features

The AfterShip App Platform integration is available in the following areas of Gladly:

Gladly Team

Four cards are available on the Customer Profile, and nine actions are available from the Conversation’s compose menu – once registered as described above. When a team member opens a Conversation, the cards match on the customer’s email address and render that customer’s shipments, returns, claims, and orders alongside the Conversation.

Every action that takes an identifier presents it as a picker over this customer’s own data, never a free-text box – an action receives no customer context, so binding the input to the profile’s own records is what keeps a team member from acting on someone else’s return. The pickers are also pre-filtered by state: “Get return label” and “Resolve return” list only approved returns, “Approve return” and “Reject return” only pending ones.

Gladly AI

The same capabilities are available to Sidekick for self-service, including shipment lookup, return lookup, warranty lookup, and return-portal links.

AfterShip is connected with an API key entered in Gladly Settings. There is no OAuth flow.

Details

What data can you access

Shipments card

  • Tracking number, carrier, and carrier phone

  • Status and human-readable status detail

  • Estimated delivery, promised delivery, shipped and delivered dates

  • Whether the estimated delivery date has already passed

  • The recent carrier checkpoint trail, not just the latest scan

  • Days since the order, and days since the last carrier scan

  • Full destination address, origin, transit time, package count, and weight

  • Whether a signature is required, and any failed delivery attempts

  • Branded tracking link, carrier tracking link, and the customer-facing reschedule link

  • Whether the customer is subscribed to proactive updates at all

  • Return window status – “Returnable until Oct 4 (12 days left)”, or “Not returnable” for a tagged order

Returns card

  • RMA number, approval status, and shipping status

  • Whether AfterShip’s own rules auto-approved it, or a person did

  • Who filed it, when it was created, approved, and refunded

  • Reject reason and merchant note

  • Return method, label URL, QR code, and packing slip

  • Label cost, estimated refund total, refunded total, and cost of return

  • Tracking number and carrier for the return journey

  • The returned items

Warranty claims card

  • Claim ID, RMA number, status, and the warranty flow it was filed under

  • The order it was filed against, and where the product was originally bought

  • Age in days, and the claimed products with the issues reported

  • Resolutions already applied, and any replacement orders raised

  • Inbound shipment tracking – the faulty item’s journey back

  • A deep link to the claim in AfterShip’s admin

Order details card

  • Order name and number, created date, and store

  • Financial status – the answer to “has my refund gone through?”

  • Fulfilment status, which is not the same as the carrier status

  • Order total, subtotal, discounts, shipping, and tax

  • Line items with SKUs and an item image

  • How much of the order can still be returned

  • Shipping and billing addresses, shipping method, and any pickup location

Available actions

  • Look up shipments, returns, and warranty claims – by order number, tracking number, or RMA

  • Approve return and generate label; Get return label; Reject return; Resolve return

  • Create return, and Receive return items – for Workflow and ops callers that hold platform line-item IDs

  • Create return label – a prepaid label via the AfterShip Shipping API

  • Send return portal link – an AfterShip deeplink pre-filled for the order

  • Approve claim, Reject claim, Process claim, and Check claim resolutions

  • Predict delivery date, and Retrack shipment

How does customer matching work?

The app matches on the customer’s email address, using the primary email on the Gladly Customer Profile, or the first email if no primary is set. A customer with no email address on file gets no lookup and an empty card, never an error.

The returns and warranty cards filter on an exact, case-insensitive customer_email at the API. The shipments card is different, and deliberately so: AfterShip’s Tracking API has no email filter – its only email-capable parameter is a substring keyword search, which can match unrelated customers. The app therefore applies its own exact-email filter to the response, and that filter fails closed. Both halves are required.

The order details card is chained off the shipments card rather than read directly, because AfterShip Commerce’s order list accepts no customer filter of any kind. Scoping comes from the parent card, which is already matched by exact email.

Key use cases

Answer “where is my order?” from the card

Use case: A customer asks where their parcel is, and when it will arrive.

How it works: The team member reads the carrier status, the latest checkpoint, and the estimated delivery date straight off the shipment card, and can send the branded tracking link in one click. When the parcel has stalled, the card says so – the delivery date has passed, or there has been no carrier scan in eleven days – rather than leaving the team member to work it out from a timestamp.

Business impact: WISMO questions are answered in the first reply, without the team member leaving the Conversation or the customer being sent to a tracking portal.

Approve a return and send the label in the Conversation

Use case: A customer wants to return an item and needs a prepaid label.

How it works: The team member picks one of this customer’s pending returns from the compose menu, approves it, and AfterShip mints the prepaid label. “Get return label” then returns the label URL and tracking number, ready to paste into the reply. Once the items are back, “Resolve return” closes it out.

Business impact: The whole approve to label to resolve loop happens in the Conversation, and every step is recorded in AfterShip. The return window shown on the card means nobody has to guess whether the return is still in policy.

Decide a warranty claim without leaving Gladly

Use case: A customer follows up on a warranty claim for a faulty item.

How it works: The team member reads the claim’s status, age, reported issues, and the inbound tracking for the faulty item off the claims card. “Check claim resolutions” shows which outcomes the merchant’s own warranty rules permit for that claim, so the team member is never offered a replacement or a store credit the merchant did not configure. Approving, rejecting, and processing are each available only if an administrator has turned them on.

Business impact: Warranty questions stop being a handoff to another team, and the resolutions offered stay inside the merchant’s configured policy.