Do agents need a credit application to start booking?

No. Most agents run on wallet — no credit application, no credit review; top up, wait for funds to clear, then draw down the balance. A credit limit can be added later as volume scales, gated by amount, aging and per-tier agent limits.

How Agents Work

How the ShipMay Agent Hierarchy Works

The hard part of multi-tier reselling isn't setting the markup — it's who can see what. As tiers deepen, pricing tends to leak: agents see the platform's cost, their downstream sees their markup, and nobody's margin stays protected. This system makes visibility a structural boundary — every tier sees only the price it's on. Here is how it actually works underneath.

Looking to apply as an agent? See the Partner Program →

Structure

depth is enforced in code, not by convention

Platform — you

✓ carrier cost ✓ every markup layer ✓ all downline orders ✓ real margin

Tier-1 agent

✓ own sell price ✓ own sub-agents ✓ own margin
✗ platform cost ✗ platform markup ✗ other agents

Tier-2 agent

✓ own sell price ✓ own customers
✗ upline cost ✗ platform cost ✗ sibling agents

End customer

✓ one final price
✗ cost or markup at any level of the chain

// This is not a hidden column — the data never leaves the API. The thing that kills a distribution model is an agent going straight to your supplier; without your buy rate, that move does not exist.

Capped at three tiers

Root agent → sub-agent → end customer. Promoting a customer walks its agent ancestry and hard-rejects anything that would create a fourth tier — a refusal, not a warning.

Pricing per tier

Each tier carries its own markup. The same shipment shows a different price at each level, and every level sees only the number it actually pays.

Recursive visibility

An agent sees its entire downline but never sibling branches, and never upstream. Ownership resolves through one recursive layer rather than ad-hoc checks per query.

Controls

the more tiers, the clearer the boundaries need to be

Downline approval gate

Toggleable per agent: orders from a sub-agent land in the parent’s queue and only reach the carrier after approval. Useful for newly onboarded agents.

Wallet by default, credit on request

Most agents just run on wallet — no credit application, no credit review; top up, wait for funds to clear, then draw down the balance. Scale up and add a credit limit: amount, aging and per-tier agent gates. A limit authorizes spending rather than posting to the ledger, so it never distorts AR.

Cost never travels down

True carrier cost and markup are stripped at the API layer, not hidden in the UI. What an agent calls "cost" is the price the platform sells to them — which they are entitled to see.