Back in 2000 I was on a team of eight, digitising a freight system. (Handling about 50% IIRC of all foreign air freight to and from Sweden.)

For a "parcel" of goods, I counted 17 paper copies of the same shipping form, being sent to and fro. Back then IATA also used a custom text field format instead of a standard XML format I think they use now.

So while this was a long time ago, I too expect shipping to be fraught with lots of weird edge cases.