Upload a commercial invoice and supporting trade documents electronically for an international shipment using the UPS Paperless Documents API
domain: developer.ups.com · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Obtain a UPS OAuth 2.0 access token from the /security/v1/oauth/token endpoint using your client ID and client secret
Encode the trade document (commercial invoice, certificate of origin, or export license) as base64 and call the Paperless Documents /upload endpoint with the document type specified
Capture the returned DocumentID and image format confirmation from the response
Reference the returned DocumentID in the InternationalForms section of the corresponding Shipping REST API request
Confirm the shipment was created successfully so the paperless trade indicator is applied instead of a printed invoice
Use the /delete endpoint to remove an uploaded document if the shipment is cancelled before label purchase
Known gotchas
Each uploaded file is capped at 10 MB and a single shipment can carry at most 13 uploaded documents
The document must be uploaded and its ID attached before the shipment request is submitted; it cannot be attached retroactively
Paperless invoice acceptance still varies by destination country, so some lanes may still require a printed copy despite successful upload
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