intelligent.pageDocs

Direct Ship

Directship was an Indian cross-border freight rate comparison platform; the site is gone and directship.in now redirects to Holisol Logistics.

Directship was an Indian cross-border freight platform, operated by Directship Private Limited, that let importers, exporters, Amazon and e-commerce sellers, enterprise shippers and logistics providers compare and book air freight, ocean freight, express, less-than-container-load and full-container-load shipments. It appears to have gone live around 2018 and to have stopped soon after. The domain directship.in now returns an HTTP 301 to holisollogistics.com, the site of Holisol Logistics Private Limited, an Indian third party logistics provider. There is no live Directship product, no developer portal and no API. This page records what the platform was and how it was verified, so the catalogue entry can be corrected or retired rather than left as a phantom integration target.

Warning

Recommendation: retire this catalogue entry, or reclassify it as a dead platform. If the intent was to reach Holisol Logistics, which now holds the domain, that is a different company with a different business (3PL warehousing and fulfilment, not freight rate comparison) and it should get its own entry. Do not scope a connector from this record.

At a glance

What it is

Or rather, what it was. The evidence is one Internet Archive capture of directship.in from 10 September 2019, which shows a fully built marketing and quoting site.

The pitch was rate visibility and instant quoting for international freight out of and into India. The homepage carried a large quote form with these options:

  • Route model: point to point, or port to port.
  • Freight type: air freight, ocean freight, express, less-than-container-load, full-container-load. Published transit guidance was "Typical transit time of 2-10 days" for the faster modes and "Typical transit time of 10-25 days" for the slower ones.
  • Incoterms: FOB, Ex Works, or "I don't know inco terms".
  • Commodity types: general, oil, electronics, DGR, non-DGR, with an HS code field.
  • Packing types: bags, bales, barrels, boxes, cartons, cases, crates, container, cylinder, DGR, drum, pallets, rolls, skids.
  • Container sizes for FCL: 20 Dry, 40 Dry, 40 HC.
  • Dimensional input in cm, in, m or mm and weight in gm, kg, lb or ton, with live computation of total weight, total volumetric weight and chargeable volume. The stated container ceiling was "Maximum volume : 33.2 cbm, Maximum weight of 19,000 Kg and Average weight of 14,000 Kg Per Container."

Two calculators sat alongside the quote form and are the most distinctive part of the product: a customs duty calculator that took an origin country (the dropdown offered China, Hong Kong and India), an HS code or goods description with category and sub-category, and a CIF or assessable value in INR or USD, and returned an estimated customs duty; and a landed cost calculator that combined invoice value, logistics cost, duty and insurance.

The audience segments named in the navigation were "Importers / Exporters", "Amazon / E-Commerce Sellers", "Enterprise Shippers" and "Logistics Providers". The enterprise section promised "Blazing fast door to door pricing and routing technology", "Incredible enterprise permission management", "Cloud Based with full language and currency localization", the ability to "manage your own rates or use of services", and "Ecommerce for cross-border oversized shipments".

The footer read "Copyrights © 2018 Directship Private Limited, India. All Right Reserved". Large parts of that same footer were still filled with lorem ipsum placeholder text at the time of capture, and one block referred to an unrelated brand ("Partner with Logistic Yatra for Bussiness"), which suggests a template that was never finished. Taken together with the disconnected state of the domain today, the reasonable reading is a product that launched, did not reach escape velocity, and was wound down.

Current state. https://directship.in/ returns HTTP 301 with a Location of https://holisollogistics.com/. Whether Holisol acquired Directship, acquired only the domain, or shared founders is not stated anywhere public, and the redirect alone does not settle it.

Holisol Logistics, for reference, is an Indian 3PL offering supply chain consulting, fulfilment centres, hyperlocal fulfilment, inbound and outbound supply chain services, transportation and IT solutions. Its named technology products are VERDIS (described as a "Virtual Data Scientist"), a WMS, a TMS, ULMS, HOPS, HOLISCOPE for last mile, a DMS, Smart Manufacturing, DOPEX and D-TALENT. None of them is called DirectShip, and the string does not appear anywhere on Holisol's site. Holisol offers a public shipment tracking form at holisollogistics.com/track-shipment that accepts an AWB number or an order number. It publishes no API documentation either, and it is listed as an integration partner by Unicommerce, which is the practical route to its data.

API access

None. No developer programme, no credentials, no contact point, because the product is not operating.

The archived site had /login, /signup and /vendor-signup, so there were shipper accounts and carrier or forwarder accounts, but those were human logins on a dead service. There is no evidence any machine interface was ever offered.

Authentication

Not applicable. Nothing to authenticate against.

Objects we can read

Nothing. The service is not live.

Had it been, the readable objects implied by the interface would have been freight quotes (origin, destination, mode, incoterm, commodity, packing, chargeable weight and volume), customs duty estimates by HS code and CIF value, landed cost estimates, and presumably bookings and shipment tracking behind the login. None of that shape survives anywhere.

Orders, order items, products and listings, inventory, shipments, returns, payments and settlements, customers, locations

All absent. A freight rate marketplace would only ever have held quotes, bookings, shipments and invoices, never a catalogue or stock.

Writing back: listings, price and stock

Not applicable, this is a carrier and freight marketplace, not a sales channel. Directship never owned a listing, a price to a consumer or a stock count.

The write path on a platform of this kind would have been quote request, booking creation and booking cancellation. No such interface was ever published, and none exists now.

Webhooks and notifications

Not applicable. No event catalogue, no subscription mechanism, nothing to poll.

Rate limits and pagination

Not applicable.

Mapping to the unified model

Nothing maps. Do not write to orders, order_items, listings, inventory, shipments, returns, settlements, customers or locations from this entry.

If a downstream pipeline already carries a channel value of direct-ship or directship, treat it as dead and archive rather than migrate. There is no successor platform to redirect it to: Holisol holds the domain but is a different business, and mapping Directship data onto Holisol would be wrong.

Gaps and open questions

  • The redirect is unexplained. directship.in pointing at Holisol Logistics could mean acquisition, a shared founder, or simply an expired domain picked up cheaply. No public source explains it. If the catalogue entry came from a partner list, asking the source which of the two companies they meant would settle it.
  • One capture only. The description above rests on a single archived page from September 2019. The Internet Archive's CDX index was unavailable during this research pass, so the full capture history, and therefore the date the site went dark, could not be established.
  • Was there ever an API? Nothing suggests one, but a 2018 freight startup with an "enterprise permission management" pitch might have had a private integration for large shippers. Unrecoverable from the archive.
  • Holisol needs its own entry. It is a real, operating Indian 3PL with an unpublished but presumably real integration surface, a public tracking form and a Unicommerce integration. It is not covered by this page and should not be folded into it.
  • Web search was unavailable for this pass. The checks were direct: DNS, HTTP redirects, archive captures, Holisol's own pages and sitemap, the ClickPost carrier index and Unicommerce's integration list. A search engine pass might surface news of what happened to Directship Private Limited.

Sources