Forum Moderators: buckworks
So far I have found these two programs:
Interapptive & Stone Edge
Stone Edge's order management system seems very expensive, and ShipWorks by Interapptive isn't working very well, but is also not cheap (avg. of $30/mo)
Can anyone share their methods or any other programs you use or may have seen?
[edited by: minnapple at 1:25 am (utc) on Sep. 21, 2006]
[edit reason] removed links [/edit]
My Worldship setup is as follows:
1. Order received
2. Pack order
3. Write order number on outside of box (and box no. if more than 1 box)
4. Enter weight, ship type (Ground/Next Day/etc), dimensions (optional), insurance (optional - defaulted at 100)
All this info is entered on the PHP order management page
5. Press "send package info to shipper" button. The shipping label details inserted into a mysql database as one record containing all the label details. address info, package info, etc.
6. Once everything has been packaged, we open up worldship and do a "batch import" from the mysql database. We had to set up mapping in worldship.
7. World ship spits out all the shipping labels with the order number and box no. in the reference field.
8. We stick the labels to the appropriate boxes.
9. We have worldship set up to automatically export shipment information. It goes into another table in our mysql database.
10. We go to a script on our PHP order management system that imports all the exported shipments from worldship. Tracking info, shipment costs, etc.
I can see this not working so well with a lot of shipping volume. It would be too cumbersome to match all the labels to boxes. But now, for under 20 orders a day it works well. Much better than hand copying/typing addresses.
same for us here, but constantly growing, and there were quite a number of days recently, where it was more. I never bumped into that mysql-interface. Can you make that run continuously, so that bar-codes and that stuff is printed at the very moment you print invoices?
Otherwise you may indeed get problems as soon as you have more than 50 packages a day. As I said, I went a different way: After printing the invoice, the php-programm switches to a form where my employees enter weight and number of packages (the rest of data is taken from the customers database). Sending that form, the receiving php-cgi performs an fwrite() on the same harddrive where the ups-woldship-server runs. There we switched on the auto-import-function, and as soon as a new xml-file is written into the relevant folder, this daemon picks it up and spits out a piece of paper with the bar code (however: it is only possible to define one specific printer there). This is the daemon philbish mentioned, it indeed scans that folder every few seconds. the daemon swallows and deletes the xml-file, and writes two other files into the same folder where you can read out error-messages and the tracking-number(s). Once a day when the ups-driver picks up the packages, we start another php-routine, which sends email-notifications to our customers with the tracking numbers read from that same folder.
It works quite fine, though you have no function to minimize that daemon-window on the server, which is a bit annoying. In addition to that the guy from the UPS support-center told me that the xml-interface might not be supported anymore in forthcoming versions.
georgei, to my experience the people at the ups-helpdesk are very, very friendly and helped me with all questions I had. This is one of the main reasons why I will stick to ups for ages, even if competitors may be 50 % cheaper. "Listen to your customers." They got it. (Hope this is still within the TOS) Just give them a call and they might tell you the most elegant way to make oscommerce and ups-worldship work together.
[edited by: Oliver_Henniges at 10:58 am (utc) on Sep. 21, 2006]
