The Scenario
You are an e-commerce operations manager. It is Monday afternoon and you have 200 pending orders in an Excel workbook — Order Queue tab, with destination ZIP in column C, weight in column D, and order ID in column A. The label budget review is at 4 PM and your director wants the cheapest carrier option for each order before any labels are purchased.
Last quarter you bought labels without rate shopping first. FedEx was consistently cheaper for West Coast orders and the gap only showed up on the carrier invoice six weeks later.
The bad version of this afternoon:
- Open the ShipEngine dashboard
- Enter a sample destination and weight
- Spot-check five orders and extrapolate
- Present an estimate at 4 PM
- The director asks about order 147 specifically and you do not have that number.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads each order row and calls ShipEngine's rate API, so you get actual carrier quotes for all 200 orders before the meeting.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Read my Order Queue workbook and get bulk ShipEngine rate quotes for all rows — write the lowest rate and carrier code per order into columns G and H. Use my warehouse as the origin and the destination ZIP in column C with the weight in column D.
SheetXAI reads the tab, calls ShipEngine's rate comparison API per row, and writes the cheapest carrier code and cost into columns G and H. Real numbers, all 200 orders, before 4 PM.
What You Get
Columns G and H populated for every order row:
- Column G — the cheapest carrier code for that order
- Column H — the quoted rate in dollars
Every figure is a live ShipEngine rate, not an estimate. If USPS beats UPS for a specific weight-destination combination, column G says USPS.
Want all three carrier quotes side by side instead of just the cheapest? Add "write all carrier options and rates into columns G through L" to the prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Order workbooks from e-commerce platforms have predictable issues. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and the rate fetch in the same prompt.
When weights are in mixed units across rows
Some rows list weight in pounds, some in ounces.
Normalize the weight values in column D of the Order Queue tab — convert ounces to pounds where the unit indicates ounces. Then fetch ShipEngine rates for each row and write the cheapest carrier and rate into columns G and H.
When some rows have blank destination ZIPs
A handful of orders are missing destination postal codes and would cause API errors.
Skip any rows in the Order Queue tab where column C is blank — write 'MISSING ZIP' into column G for those. For all other rows, fetch ShipEngine rates and write the cheapest carrier and rate into columns G and H.
When you want only ground or standard services excluded
Your warehouse manager flagged that express services are not approved for this batch.
For each row in the Order Queue tab, fetch ShipEngine rates excluding overnight and express service codes. Write the cheapest ground or standard carrier and rate into columns G and H.
When orders come from two tabs with different layouts and you want a consolidated rate summary
The Domestic Orders tab and the International Orders tab have different column structures.
Read the Domestic Orders tab (destination ZIP in column C, weight in column D) and the International Orders tab (country in column D, postal code in column E, weight in column F). Fetch ShipEngine rates for each row. Write cheapest carrier and rate into the last two columns of each tab, then create a new Rate Summary tab showing total estimated cost by carrier across both tabs.
The pattern: normalize and rate-shop in one prompt so the pre-label review is ready when the meeting starts.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with a list of pending orders, then ask it to fetch ShipEngine rate quotes per row. The ShipEngine integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to create a batch and generate labels from the workbook or the ShipEngine in Excel overview.