AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I had to go fishing around your web site to find the way to send a feature request to you to add a Phone2 column to ac_Addresses so we can collect both a primary and alternate phone field in the user's address info. I find on the right side of http://help.ablecommerce.com that on 1/27 a patch was released for FedEx. My admin RSS feed has, as of today, Feb 20th, has the last message dated 1/20 for the USPS change.

Why isn't my merchant admin feed refreshing daily?

Why don't you e-mail your customers to notify them of hotfixes, patches, things to prevent them from having business interruptions?

I cannot express my dissatisfaction enough with Able's inability to keep us merchants informed! You just don't get it! Customers are NOT going to come to your site daily or even weekly to go hunting down what's new.

Please improve your communications practices with your customers if you value your customers at all!

I apologize for being harsh, I just hate being surprised as I try hard to keep my software up to date. If there is something that could affect "money" such as this patch fixes, it must be brought to the customer's attention, i.e. us AC 7 owners. I pay you for a subscription for the sole intent of keeping my store up to date. As a paying customer please have some sense of urgency to notify me/us of these patches.

Thank you.

Why isn't the FedEx patch in the Merchant Admin RSS feed?

We are currently in the process of certification with FedEx. The current patch is available to ease concerns of people receiving notifications from FedEx. We *do* have a working integration with web services, and it can be used now if you sign up for your own developer key, but we must go through the official process. At the conclusion we will have a patch that can be advertised in our feed. It will also eliminate the step of signing up for a developer key.

Thanks Logan. I saw the patch and installed it. I just checked it again and it makes no mention this is not a "certified" implementation - now I'm concerned. Should there be a warning that using the patch is....???

This issue only applies to products using the "Ship Separately" calculation option. However, we recommend applying the patch if you are using the newer FedEx Web Services integration.

The problem occurs when multiple quantities of the same item are purchased, the number of packages sent to FedEx is incorrect.

For example, if you have an order with the same 3 items, the shipping will be calculated on 1 item only.


Download:
ftp://ftp.ablecommerce.com/patches/FedExWS.zip


Instructions:
1.Extract the 2 new files to a temporary location on the server.

- CommerceBuilder.FedExWS.dll
- CommerceBuilder.FedExWS.XmlSerializers.dll

2.Backup the same files that exist in your \Bin\ folder.

3.Copy both of the new files to the \Bin\ folder of your AbleCommerce installation.

4.Recycle the application, or restart the web server.

The patch you installed works - it was tested to ensure we were able to return rates correctly in line with the existing integration. The certification process will allow us to facilitate registration so that merchants don't have to act as their own developer - requesting their own keys. If you have it in place already I wouldn't mess with it.

So I just got a call from our FedEx Tech Support Rep. that we were on a list of shippers still using the old method of real time freight rating and was making sure we had an upgrade path. He said the the current method will cease to work at the end of May, so roughly 1-1/2 months away. I'm hoping AbleCommerce isn't waiting until the last minute to release this update as "Official".

Neal, have you been using the update in production? has it been stable and accurate? I'm sure many of the other users would love some reassurance.

Thanks
Chip
www.OVISonline.com

Chip,

I updated right away, no problems noted.

Thanks for the info Neal!

If the official release doesn't come before mid-May, I'll get a FedEx developer number and install.

Chip

Has anyone been able to get international rates? I'm getting domestic, but not international on two test sites.