The Scenario
You are a 3PL operator. You are onboarding a new client who has 12 warehouse locations across the US. Their names and full addresses are in an Excel workbook — Fulfillment Centers tab, columns A through F: warehouse name, street, city, state, ZIP, country. You need all 12 created as origin warehouses in ShipEngine before Monday's label run. It is Friday at 3 PM.
Creating them manually means 12 separate trips through ShipEngine's warehouse setup UI. Fill in the form, save, copy the warehouse ID, switch back to Excel, paste it in. Twelve times, right now.
The bad version of Friday afternoon:
- Log into ShipEngine
- Click Add Warehouse for warehouse one
- Fill in the form
- Copy the returned warehouse ID
- Switch back to Excel and paste it into column H
- Repeat eleven more times
- Make a typo on warehouse nine's ZIP
- Find out Monday when the label run fails.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the location rows and calls ShipEngine's warehouse API for each one, so all 12 warehouses are created and the IDs are back in the workbook before you leave.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Read my Fulfillment Centers Excel workbook and create a ShipEngine warehouse for each row, then write the new warehouse ID into column H. Use column A for name and columns B through F for the full origin address.
SheetXAI reads the tab, calls ShipEngine's warehouse creation API per row, and writes each returned warehouse ID into column H. Twelve warehouses, twelve IDs, before 4 PM.
What You Get
Column H populated with the ShipEngine warehouse ID for every row:
- Warehouse ID — the ShipEngine identifier you pass when creating shipments and labels from that origin
- Error reason — if any warehouse creation fails, the error message lands in column H so you know which row to fix
The IDs are live in the workbook and ready to reference immediately. If you want to create a test rate quote from warehouse one right after, tell SheetXAI to do it — it reads the ID from column H.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Location data from clients is never format-ready. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and the creation in the same prompt.
When state values are full names instead of two-letter codes
The client sent the workbook with "Texas" in column D instead of "TX."
Convert the state values in column D of the Fulfillment Centers tab from full names to two-letter abbreviations. Then create a ShipEngine warehouse for each row and write the returned warehouse ID into column H.
When some ZIP codes are missing leading zeros
A few Northeast locations have four-digit ZIPs because Excel dropped the leading zero on import.
Pad any ZIP codes in column E of the Fulfillment Centers tab that are fewer than five digits with a leading zero. Then create a ShipEngine warehouse for each row and write the returned warehouse ID into column H.
When each location needs both an outbound and a return warehouse
The client wants separate ship-from and return-to warehouse IDs in ShipEngine for each physical location.
Create two ShipEngine warehouses per row in the Fulfillment Centers tab — one named
[Name] - Outboundand one named[Name] - Returns, both using the same address in columns B through F. Write the outbound warehouse ID into column H and the returns warehouse ID into column I.
When you need to create the warehouses and immediately test each one with a rate quote to confirm configuration
You want to validate each warehouse before handing off to the client.
Create a ShipEngine warehouse for each row in the Fulfillment Centers tab using columns A through F and write the returned warehouse ID into column H. Then fetch a test rate quote from each warehouse ZIP to ZIP code 90210 for a 2 lb package and write the cheapest available carrier and rate into columns I and J. If any warehouse returns a rate error, write the error into column I instead.
The pattern: create and verify in one prompt so you are not discovering configuration problems on a live label run.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any workbook with a list of warehouse locations, then ask it to create them in ShipEngine and write the IDs back. The ShipEngine integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to get bulk rate quotes from your warehouses or the ShipEngine in Excel overview.