The best logistics platforms don’t lock data behind dashboards—they let you pipe that data straight into the workflows, customer portals, and back‑office systems you already use.
Today’s Launch Week drop delivers exactly that with a suite of new and expanded APIs that expose every route, milestone, and alert you see inside Terminal49.
Shipment and Container Routing API with Live Vessel Positions
Vessel trackers like MarineTraffic and Vesselmon show dots on a map, but a shipment’s path is rarely a straight line. Transshipments, vessel changes, and rail handoffs all impact arrival times and estimated times of arrival (ETAs). Building a complete picture from raw data is tedious and prone to error.
Terminal49 tracks the position of every container vessel moving globally and combines this data with milestones from ocean carriers, terminals, and railroads. The result is a complete, reliable, and up-to-date route of the shipment and its containers.
The Capability
- The Routing API returns the entire shipment journey, including the port of loading, transshipment stops, and final port of discharge, as well as historical and predicted vessel positions with timestamps.
- Live Vessel Positions with latitude, longitude, and heading, refreshed every 15 minutes.
- Actual and estimated vessel arrival and departure timestamps at each node.
- Vessel name and voyage ID for every leg of the journey.
- Complete port and terminal metadata, including name, city, country, LOCODE, latitude/longitude, and FIRMS code for all key touchpoints.
👉 We've written an in-depth developer guide on how to integrate the new routing and vessel positions API:
Embeddable Map: A Live Shipment Map. In Your App.
Everyone loves a good map—especially one that tells the full story. Where did it start? What’s the route? Are there any stops or delays? In logistics, a shipment's journey is rarely straightforward. It can include multiple vessels, transshipments, and ports.
Operators and customers often know the typical flow of shipments across lanes they manage, but when timelines change, they need a live picture to understand what’s happening and where. Static ETAs and generic vessel dots just don’t cut it.
Building that level of interactive visibility yourself is complex and time-consuming. Now you don’t have to.
The Embeddable Map is a turnkey, drop-in tool. With one line of HTML, you can show:
- The full route map of past and upcoming vessel movements
- All transshipment ports and route transitions
- Estimated and actual arrival/departure data at each stop
You can embed the map into your TMS, customer portal, or internal dashboard—no backend work required. It instantly mirrors the same map Terminal49 operators use.
Why It Matters
Deliver visual, context-rich tracking right where customers and teams need it—without burning engineering cycles. Eliminate the “Where’s my box?” emails with a live map they can trust.
👉 Check out this guide on how you can embed the Terminal49 map in your app.
Unified Container Events API — One Timeline of Milestones across Every Source.
Container milestone data is scattered—across carrier EDI feeds, terminal systems, AIS tracking, and rail carrier websites. Combining them into a clean, trustworthy timeline is time-consuming and difficult to maintain.
The Capability
The Container Transport Events API returns the exact unified feed used in the Terminal49 dashboard—deduplicated, chronologically ordered, and source-tagged. You don’t need to poll multiple endpoints or stitch data together manually.
Why It Matters
Power internal dashboards, customer-facing apps, or analytics pipelines with high-fidelity event data. Save engineering hours and eliminate messy reconciliation logic.
Expanded Webhooks — Real-Time Alerts Without Polling
Polling APIs wastes compute, increases latency, and clutters your system with unnecessary requests.
New webhook topics notify your systems instantly when key events happen:
- Container Discharged
- Available for Pickup
- Last Free Day (LFD)
- Line or Customs Hold/Release
- Terminal Fees or Demurrage
Payloads are pushed to your endpoint in real time—enabling instant reactions across your TMS, CRM, or alerting tools.
Why It Matters
Your operators, partners, and customers get timely alerts. Your engineers don’t have to build or maintain fragile polling loops.
Check out the list of all the webhooks notifications on our developer docs and examples of each notification, and how to integrate them in your system.
This is visibility infrastructure designed for real-world logistics that are facing constant disruption.
Key Takeaways
- Integrate the Routing API to access live vessel positions and full shipment routes, refreshed every 15 minutes, for accurate ETAs.
- Embed Terminal49’s live shipment map in your app with one line of code to reduce status update emails and boost customer trust.
- Use the unified Container Events API to eliminate manual data stitching and save hours on milestone reconciliation across carriers.
- Set up expanded webhooks for instant alerts on key container events, cutting latency and engineering overhead from polling.
