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DHL Shipping & Magento - 10 years and counting | PART 1

In April 2020, the new DHL Shipping extension for Magento 2 was released, followed by a feature update in June and a Magento 2.4 compatibility release in September of the same year. This series of blog posts shares a bit of the history and highlights features that make this entirely revised DHL Shipping integration for Magento stand out.

10 years and counting

Netresearch has a long tradition as Magento extension manufacturer for logistics and payment service providers. The first Git commit for the DHL Intraship Magento 1 module, our very first DHL project, dates back to June 2010.

An integral part of order fulfillment - just a few clicks away.

Since then, a lot has changed but one thing has always remained the same: DHL Intraship and all its successor modules for Magento enable the merchant to retrieve shipping labels from the DHL web services, print and attach them to the parcels with no additional programming work needed, and no acquisition cost.

10 years ago, Netresearch started a long-term relationship with DHL. Based on this guide of DHL Intraship back from those days, we ventured into the implementation of the very first DHL Magento integrations.

Magento 1 DHL extensions

Many updates to the DHL modules were driven by changes to the DHL web services. Sometimes, only a new API version came out, sometimes the API was completely rewritten. The deprecation of the Intraship API was the start of the DHL Versenden module, which served merchants until the Magento 1 end of life (and beyond).

In addition to retrieving shipping labels from web services, new accompanying modules integrated more DHL features into the Magento platform: DHL Online Returns allows customers to request return shipping labels on demand. DHL Location Finder adds a map to the checkout, enabling customers to select a pickup location for parcel delivery as opposed to their residential shipping address.

A lesser known iteration is the DHL VLS extension which was supposed to replace DHL Intraship but became obsolete before hitting the streets: The DHL API it was supposed to connect to never made it to production, it was abandoned during the project.