Shipping Rates

confusion

[nonstop]

I'm writing my own shopping cart and I thought I'd add some nifty shipping calculators in but i'm confused over how they work.

I found an example for ups.com, but it only works for americans, uk is not supported :(

Do you guys have shipping calculators on your stores
or do you just enter the shipping ammount yourselves?

do shipping companies normally have a shipping calculator that on-line stores can link up to?

it seems crazy that they wouldn't, but i'm finding
it hard to work through..

[Rugles]

>>do shipping companies normally have a shipping calculator that on-line stores can link up to?

Yes, some do.

But you can code one for yourself by getting the zones and rate charts from whoever you are dealing with and creating a database. You will also need to measure and weigh the items that you are shipping.

[lorax]

IMHO if you can afford the time/investment it would be better to build your own largely because of reliability issues. While the UPS and Fedex connections that I've used for shipping rates are pretty good, I've had them go offline as well.

[nonstop]

Is there a site out there that can provide this service for me..

they hold all the shipping rates for all the different
shipping companies.

I send a query to them and they return the quote.

[Rugles]

I don't think the courier companies would allow such a thing. Besides, your rates are specific to you. You have to negotiate with them, the more volume you give them the higher the discount.
Often, if your rates are very good you even have to sign a confidentiality aggreement not to disclose your rates to the competing companies.

[nonstop]

good point, I'll do it the database way

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What fields will I need in my database, so far i've got:

Shipping Service Name
Weight
Length
Height
Width
To
From
Rate

is there anything else I should add?

[lorax]

Not sure if this applies to you or not but other things to consider are:

is the product perishable
is the product fragile
is the product time sensitive

[Rugles]

Do you need the "To". Are you not always shipping from the same place?
Plus, if you are in North America you will need the beyond points. That is for very remote places there is an extra charge.
We did it with 2 tables. One determines the zone. The second has all the rates.

[nonstop]

Thanks guys,

yep I've got another couple of tables for zones and sub zones.

I added the from because some products may be shipped from different locations.

[spikey]

Most of the shipping companies have APIs that you can use if you do enough volume with them.

If you import rate sheets and do your own calculations, make very sure you monitor the real rate sheets for changes because you can guarantee they're going to go up, not down and you'll be out the $$.

I have no clue what market you're in, but we moved to a flat rate shipping (e.g. $5/order) and it helped our conversion. Users just understand it better and it's SO much easier to explain.