Newbie Shipping Setup for US only

[hondo69]

PLATFORM: ASP.NET
VERSION: 7.0
BUILD: 9879

Having lots of issues with shipping via UPS. First, you have to create a UPS account and give them your credit card number. Since everything we sell is drop ship I won't be using the account, but I imaging they'll send be a bill each month anyway for $0 shipping and $5 statement fee. Can't wait for that.

I've looked at my UPS account and don't see a way to make it use a different shipping zip code than that for my account. My vendor is many states away and all shipping costs will be off by quite a bit.

Next, I delete the 300 or so countries from the shipping table shown in Admin. That was a treat. Seems like there should be an easier way than to delete them one at a time. Like ticking US as the ship to country and clicking a button to delete the rest.

The last step is testing the shipping rates by adding some items to the cart. Of course, the costs are way off since they are based on my company's zip code, not my vendors. But the real treat is having to select a state from the drop-down list, then entering a city, then entering a zip code. UPS only needs a zip code to calculate rates. Same with FedEx.

Is there an easy method of editing the code snippet so my customers can simply enter their zip code only to obtain an estimate?

I'm not quite near spontaneous combustion, but I hear sizzling.

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello Ken,

We meet again:).

First of all you don't need to provide UPS a CC to setup an account. Deleting all of the countries, it could be easier. But I guess you're done, so we can move past that one.

Now what we can work on is vendors and warehouses. If you have no physical inventory and everything is drop shipped then create a new warehouse with your vendors address and then on the product page select that warehouse for each of your products. Then the origin zip code will be correct and so will the rates.

We'll have to make further enhancements to the calculator to solve the last issue. First time anyone's mentioned it. It does remember the selections, so the customer only need enter the data once.

[afm]

The FedEx rate service does not require a city, but if you do not supply one then the rate that is returned by FedEx is not as accurate. In my experience the non-city quote is always higher than the rate quote if the city is specified...sometimes much higher.

[hondo69]

Thanks for the great tips.

I looked on the UPS web site to see if you could create a "rate feed" account used for online carts. They used to have one a few years ago but I didn't see it this time I signed up. If anyone knows how the trick to signing up without a credit card it would help everyone if we knew how.

I'll definitely work on the vendor warehouse setup. Sounds like that could solve half my problem.

Thanks again.

[jmestep]

I've been able to set up UP on my dev sites without entering a charge card number.