[ic] Shipping & Real-time Integration to UPS, DHL, FedEx, etc

Jon prtyof5 at attglobal.net
Tue Sep 13 23:55:51 EDT 2005


> * Melissa <intrchng-list at outfitters.com> [2005-09-13 13:15]:
> > From perusing the list archives, I gather that tying into
> > the real-time shipping modules for UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc, was
> > not recommended due to unreliability and slow responses from
> > those systems?
> >
> > Are the response times / reliability still problematic?  Is
> > anyone using the real-time services?
>
> It depends on what you consider to be reliable.  During the 2004 shopping
> season (Nov-Dec), UPS slowed down considerably, and many requests errored
> out over a period of several hours (on more than one occasion).
>
> > If you're using your own shipping tables (as we are), what method do you
> > use to keep up with the changes in rates & fuel surcharges?
>
> [Warning: shameless plug follows.]
>
> Business::Shipping comes with 2005 offline tables for UPS as well as scripts
> to screen-scrape the new fuel surcharges every month.  I wrote a tool to
> convert the tables when UPS updates them once per year, but I've yet to
> release it (no one has asked, and I haven't gotten any round tuits).
>
> http://search.cpan.org/dist/Business-Shipping/
>
>

   I use the on-line rate checker interface for FedEx most of the time.
Since I can't seem to count on the FedEx rate server to work 100%
of the time I've set up a cron to monitor the rate check results and
if it doesn't appear to be working I switch to use the table.  And I
didn't want to depend on keeping my copy of the rate tables
up to date... to much hassle though this is the first I've read of
Dan's script method.  Wonder if it works for FedEx as well.

Jon




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