With DP World discontinuing SeaRates, teams that built on its container tracking API need a replacement. If your TMS, ERP, customer portal or internal dashboards pulled tracking data from SeaRates, those features will stop updating.

This checklist walks you through replacing a container tracking API in an orderly way, so your team and your customers keep their visibility.

1. Take Stock of What You Used

Before you compare providers, write down exactly how your systems used SeaRates. Teams often rely on more than they remember.

Lookup types: Did you track by container number, booking number, Bill of Lading or a mix?
Data fields: Which fields do your systems actually read? Typical ones are current status, location, vessel name and voyage, port of loading and discharge, ETA and ATA, and the event history.
Delivery method: Did you poll for updates on a schedule, or receive pushed updates such as webhooks?
Carriers: Which shipping lines make up most of your volume?
Volume: How many containers do you track per month, and how many are active at once?
Where the data goes: List every screen, report, email and customer notification that uses tracking data.

Search your codebase for every call to the old API so nothing is missed.

2. Decide What You Need From a Replacement

Use your inventory to set requirements:

Carrier coverage for the shipping lines in your volume
Data freshness: how quickly new carrier events show up
ETA quality: carrier ETAs only, or predicted ETAs as well
Clean, consistent event data across carriers, so you don't need carrier-specific logic
Pricing that fits your volume, whether per container, per request or a subscription
Support for questions while you migrate

3. Map the Data Model

No two tracking APIs return identical responses. Build a small mapping layer between the new provider's fields and your internal model, rather than changing every place in your code that reads tracking data. Pay attention to:

Status and event names, which you'll likely need to map to your own list
Date and time zone formats
How the provider represents estimated and actual dates
Location identifiers such as UN/LOCODEs and port names

4. Run a Parallel Test

If any of your existing tracking still works, compare it with the new provider on a sample of live containers across your main carriers for a week or two. Check that statuses, dates and ETAs line up and that new events arrive quickly enough for your use case.

If the old data is already unavailable, test the new provider against containers you can verify on the shipping lines' own websites.

5. Switch Over and Re-add Active Shipments

Re-register all active containers with the new provider. Pull container numbers from your own database rather than relying on an export from the old service.
Backfill recent history where the provider supports it.
Update any customer-facing pages and notifications.
Monitor error rates and missing updates closely for the first few weeks.

6. Tell Your Users

If customers or colleagues saw SeaRates-powered tracking in your product, let them know the data source has changed and whether anything looks different.

A Container Tracking API From ContainerTracking.ai

Our container tracking API gives you real-time container status, ETAs and complete event history across major shipping lines, including Maersk, MSC, CMA CGM, COSCO, Hapag-Lloyd, ONE, Evergreen, HMM and ZIM, through one integration. Get in touch to discuss your volume and migration timeline.

If you only need to check a few containers yourself, the Container Tracking App for iPhone may be all you need. See our guide on tracking containers without SeaRates, or our SeaRates alternative page for an overview.

SeaRates is a trademark of its respective owner. ContainerTracking.ai is an independent service and is not affiliated with SeaRates or DP World. This article describes general API migration practice and doesn't reflect the SeaRates API's documentation.