USPS Rate Calculator API down?

[whoisgregg]

Can't seem to figure out why, but my sites which get real-time rate quotes from USPS are all displaying errors instead.

Anyone else having problems? Or is it just me?

[jwolthuis]

They were totally down as of around 10am EST, but came partially back up late this afternoon. We're still seeing intermittent failures. I guess they had a major hardware glitch.

[lorax]

Seems to happen every year around this time - one or another of the shippers has melt-down.

[rocknbil]

Been up and down all day, as of this moment, still getting "service unavailable" and internal server errors from the API. So what are all of you doing in the interim?

We switched to the UPS API, temporarily.

[whoisgregg]

Still dealing with intermittent service from the USPS rate calculator api. :(

[rocknbil]

Looks like it's resolved this AM. I called and their response was "some time tonight" (yesterday.) It was broken until I collapsed around 2 AM. :-)

Seems OK this AM, will be checking throughout the day.

I suppose this is a wake up call for us programmers to put a little more attention to alternate methods. For us it was a switch to UPS, maintaining functionality within a short time, but it is not a "great" solution. For our items, UPS is considerably more expensive for small items. Not good.

[mvander]

Wow, this sounds like a show stopper! Ouch.

[rocknbil]

<pedals backward> whoisgregg is correct - it was up for about an hour, dipping in and out. We took a more aggressive approach and are offering free shipping across the board for U.S. orders and in-stock items.

*sigh* oh well. :-) I wouldn't take a million USD to be a USPS programmer right now . . . .

[whoisgregg]

We took a more aggressive approach and are offering free shipping across the board for U.S. orders and in-stock items.

We did the same basic thing. No sense screwing around this week of all weeks.

[D_Blackwell]

USPS Click-N-Ship suffered one or more mission critical failures starting yesterday afternoon.

The Home page even has an ALERT with a link for more 'information'. It is typical of USPS to crash their systems when making updates, sometimes taking days to fully correct. It is always deny, deny, deny. I have never seen them admit to a problem with their services.

The 'information' page was changed from "we apologize..." to recommending usage of Endicia or Stamps instead.

This morning all of our USPS accounts received a USPS email about the "interment interruptions" and essentially said that Endicia or Stamps was the only way to get a label printed online. I have NEVER gotten an email from USPS (except for confirmations), not even to thank us for the thousands of dollars of business that we give them. This must be a disaster of epic proportions. They never admit to anything - ever.

Of course, being USPS, probably everybody clocked out at 5:00pm yesterday and they are just now putting a couple of people into looking into problem:))

[rocknbil]

We got an email . . . . today. Still up and down, apparently.

[p5gal5]

Goodbye, USPS...hello FedEx! Still sending first-class items with USPS, but everything else is going FedEx. The Click-n-Ship "tracking" is absolute crap, anyway.

[particleman]

gahh, this is still not working randomly today. What a joke. I'm going to have to do some code rewrites now. This is what I hate about having something like this out of our control.

[rocknbil]

Yeah I was just checking in to see if anyone had any good news, apparently not. External services always make me nervous, and this is why. I think I'll self-contain our shipping but I'm not exactly sure how to approach it just yet.

I did note, however, that the calculators on their site are working OK.

[vincevincevince]

I've never been very keen on shipping APIs myself; however rates these days are getting so complex and change so frequently that it gets hard to do things manually. That being said - changes are rarely big jumps from the previous rate - so losses aren't going to be serious for the orders you process at the cheaper rate before you realise things don't match.

It may be worth caching previous results for this kind of problem - whilst you are still going to have lookups which you've never seen before, at least you will have good support for your key returning users / repeat orderers.

I think I'll self-contain our shipping but I'm not exactly sure how to approach it just yet.

Most shipping services I've seen can be described as a permutation map of:

Delivery time (day range)

Weight or

Volume or

Volumised Weight

Location (zone, state, country)

That is, your function needs to be able to give an answer to:

getShippingRate($daysrequired,$orderweight,$ordervolume,$volumisedweight,$destination);

Some shippers have more detailed graduations than others (e.g. some may break down by state, some by zip) but by having a single function interface you can then drop into the permutation which contains the request, without worrying about class size.

[rocknbil]

^ ^ Agreed. It's a little more complex than that though, with some hidden variables . . . one example . . . one would expect Parcel Post to be cheaper than Priority, which in most cases it is. We have one long and narrow item that always calculates cheaper via Priority. Another is the availability of Express mail, which is not in high demand but enough to keep around. No way would we try to table that one out. :-)

Oversize fees are another one difficult to program out due to variables in how, say, delicate items require packaging versus unbreakable ones.

Then there's the grooviness of rate changes without any real notification.

Updates from here: Since yesterday our tests seem to show the API has stabilized, with one exception we can find: when you query "All rates" first class is showing one value (ex: $0.84) then when you query only First Class it shows $1.66, which is consistent with the rates of past orders (since last increase.) So there's still some problems . . . .