USPS API - Rates

[limons]

Basically I'm needing help with understanding how to best serve our customers. Right now our USPS integration returns a lot of rates that are difficult for clients to deal with, such as:

USPS Priority Mail Express 2-Day
USPS Priority Mail Express 2-Day Flat Rate Envelope
USPS Priority Mail Express 2-Day Hold For Pickup
USPS Priority Mail Express 2-Day Flat Rate Envelope Hold For Pickup
USPS Priority Mail Express 2-Day Sunday/Holiday Delivery

This is not a great experience for the shoppers. I'm trying to understand how to simply this, so our clients can simply choose "Priority Mail" as a shipping option, for example.

I've reached out to USPS, researched other websites, looked at other ecommerce platforms, and honestly I'm at a total loss on how to simplify USPS rates.

[not2easy]

Hi limons and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Various checkout methods offer various methods to account for shipping costs. There are not as many levels of USPS fees as there are services. If your process allows you to offer different levels of service (shipping speed vs. cost for example), you can select and offer the few options that are most suited to your shipments and customers' preferences.

All the Express shipping options you listed above have a basic cost plus an optional service (such as hold for pickup). If your products don't fit into the USPS Express Envelopes you don't need to list them if your process lets you set up your options rather than list everything available via api.

Most businesses have a few standard shipping options but it does require your time to research what options are best for your products and customers. You can offer others separately - "Contact us for overnight shipping" when it is seldom required. Fewer options are better if customers need to go through a long list. A few hours of your (or a clerk's) time can save your customer the frustration of decisions.

You can look through the USPS shipping options and rates here: https://www.usps.com/ship/mail-shipping-services.htm and decide which options fit your products and customers. Keep the data for other options on hand so if they do contact you for Express rates with signature confirmation you will know the additional cost.

If you can only integrate the rates via their API look for how to limit it to services you want to offer.

[limons]

Hello not2easy - thank you very much for the detailed reply.

We don't actually handle product but rather build ecommerce software. What I'm trying to do is figure out how the heck to condense the crazy list of services USPS returns to something that makes more sense, like how Big Commerce does it: [support.bigcommerce.com...]

They simply offer the main tier - Priority Mail, First Class, etc, but not all to the level of detail that USPS provides rates via their API. I'm at a loss on how they, or other platforms like shopify, do this