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

Daniel Browning db at kavod.com
Wed Sep 14 01:33:18 EDT 2005


* Jon <prtyof5 at attglobal.net> [2005-09-13 22:07]:
> > * Melissa <intrchng-list at outfitters.com> [2005-09-13 13:15]:
> > > 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/
> >
  [...]
> 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.

Only UPS at the moment, although I would like to add FedEx and USPS
eventually.  It's rather vendor-specific because it does a *lot* of work to
clean up the UPS data and optimize it for fast lookups.  UPS appears to have
an army of obsfucation experts that make their tables difficult for
machine-reading. The least of their antics is to release a small percentage
of their files as actual Excel binary-format spreadsheets, despite being
named .csv.

-- 
Daniel Browning <db at kavod.com> - Kavod Technologies.  Random Fortune:
Never make anything simple and efficient when a way can be found to
make it complex and wonderful.


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