Obligatory info for amalgamated AIS tracking for ships:
marinetraffic.com
vesselfinder.com
Quite useful. Most ocean carriers, Maersk included, have horrible tracking of their shipments. No API, outdated and buggy IE4-ish sites, and inconsistent info. (I've used Selenium to web scrape data from ocean carriers before.)
Probably the most modern I've seen is Hapag-Lloyd, and they provide a email interface with a turnaround time of 5 minutes - then you can just scrape the results.
Ocean Carriers have the 1970s - '80s version of an API. EDI messages. If you do business with an ocean carrier you can receive an EDI feed when a shipment or a specific container hits certain milestones in the transportation process.
I worked at an investment bank for a while in a commodities department that dealt with physical commodities. Using those websites and Solarc/Openlink RightAngle [1] we could actually find one of our containers full of oil delivering into Singapore. Kind of cool.
If you ever had a Bloomberg, we let you map all the worldwide shipping traffic in realtime and dive into ships/cargo in the BMAP function. Almost exclusively used by commodities desks like the one you were probably at :)
It doesn't. Once you know it's loaded all you care about it whether the boat is coming in. so you're going to still have to track the container until it's actually on the boat.
marinetraffic.com vesselfinder.com
Quite useful. Most ocean carriers, Maersk included, have horrible tracking of their shipments. No API, outdated and buggy IE4-ish sites, and inconsistent info. (I've used Selenium to web scrape data from ocean carriers before.)
Probably the most modern I've seen is Hapag-Lloyd, and they provide a email interface with a turnaround time of 5 minutes - then you can just scrape the results.