figuring shipping charges

[MaineWeb]

I manage an E-commerce site for a company that sells refurbished telephone equipment. At this point customers place their order and provide payment information before they know what the shipping charges will be. We haven't adopted a method such as charging based on total dollar amount of the order because you could buy a small item for a lot of money and a large-sized item for not much. It just wouldn't work.

I would never order from a site that doesn't give you shipping charges up front, so I'm trying to come up with something.

A lot of eBay auctions have a UPS calculator in the listing where you can just enter your zip code and it tells you the shipping charges based on the weight of the item and location of the shipper based on information supplied by the seller. I would like to implement something like that.

I signed up for online tools with UPS, but what they offered is too complicated. It would require the customer to enter our location, the weight, the size of the package, etc. That's just too much to ask, I think.

Has anyone found anything simple? FedEx would be fine, too. We have an account with both. I was just thinking of UPS because of what I've seen on eBay. Thanks,

[MaineWeb]

In case anyone other than me is interested.....

In looking around the web, I found this site, www.paypalshoppingcart.org. They are going to try to help me integrate the calculator even though its not a paypal site. Their prices are reasonable. To try a demo click on the link below and "Add to Cart" and you'll see how it works.

http://www.paypalshoppingcart.org/cg...&categnumber=7


I'm still interested in suggestions!!!!

[sms123]

You might try doing a web search for UPS RATE MONGER. You did not specify the language you are using but I imagine that there are various versions for the various languanges. I use ColdFusion and it works great and it was free.

[ADAM Web Design]

I'm not American, so you may want to take this with a bit of a grain of salt, but sms123 may be on to something.

Many of the shipping companies (such as Canada Post, UPS, Federal Express) have free shipping calculators that send XML requests to the shipping company's server with weight, dimensions, and originating/destination postal code, and a response is sent back. Canada Post's, for example, is shockingly easy to work with for the experienced programmer.

That may be the route you wish to take.

[MaineWeb]

I did look into a FedEx and UPS calculator, but they all require you to enter information including the dimensions of the package, which my customers wouldn't know. I thought that since eBay auctions have simple UPS calculators based ONLY on the weight of the package and the zip codes of the seller and buyer, I could get something like that, too.

I guess some other company must have designed the calculator because UPS says they don't have anything like that.

The PayPal Shopping cart is looking like the winner. It is reasonably priced and they are willing to work with me to customize it. I never would have thought this could be so complicated!

[sfowler]

I use UPS a lot, and they only ever bill me on weight. FedEx requires volume, so that is no real alternative, unless you have all the data available with the article.

[brian.mark]

Weight is used for most every shipment (UPS / FedEx, etc.) unless it is traveling via air (2nd day, next day, etc.) The reason for this is there is only so much space available for shipments on an airplane, so they need to make sure you're not sending a 1 lb box that takes up the entire back of a plane. They have a formula for figuring dimensional weight available, so we have both a weight and a dimensional weight entered on all of our products. It doesn't take long, and their tools then will give you correct rates.

Your concern about people having to enter the shipping zip code doesn't make sense... you know what your zip code is, so you can code that into the query you send to UPS on your customer's behalf. You just need the customer's shipping zip code.

We also integrated Priority Mail into our solution. If you want to view an example, our site is www.toolbarn.com. We also took the time to integrate trucking company rates from RoadWay (now owned by DHL I believe) and a few others.

In case you're wondering, I am the one who has done all of the development on both of our sites, so this isn't something that you need a whole team of people to accomplish by any means.

Brian.

[MaineWeb]

I checked out your site and that works very well. What E-commerce program do you use?

If I didn't have thousands of items in the catalog, I would enter dimensions. I think the PayPal cart is going to work fine. I'm sure you are right about the UPS online tools, but having to enter the zip code was not the only problem.

[brian.mark]

We don't use an e-commerce program. I have written both sites from the beginning to end on my own.

As for thousands of products, we currently store the weight of not only the 6,000 products on ToolBarn, but also over 1/4 million parts on Tool Parts Direct. Most of that information (including dimensions) has been available from our manufacturers, although initially we had to do it all manually. The more that e-commerce takes off in your industry, the better everyone will be about getting the info you need. Being a used equipment dealer, that may be tougher than someone set up directly with the factory, but it should still be available.

BTW, do you deal with Vodavi at all? Your site confused me when I searched for that brand.

Brian.

[advancedmerchant]

I took a look at your site, and it does not appear that you are shipping anything that needs UPS's "Dimmed Weight" function, which is basically for REALLY large (or long, or wide) packages. You are shipping boxes with phones and phone equipment, which is very proportional to weight (unlike a length of pipe, or bag of styrofoam peanuts).

Anyway, to make a long story short, I found FREE code for the calculator at http://auctionsupplies.com/ups/

As far as actual, individual weights are concerned, you can weigh one phone, in a box, and guess what? Most of your others will be +/- 20%. Unless you do a lot of volume and/or bulk orders, you can pre assign a weight for X phones, regardless of brand, by 'rounding up' at the beginning. We ship card readers/printers, and they all weigh (packaged) about 3.2 lbs, plus or minus half a pound. They are all listed at 4, and it works. When an item becomes popular enough to matter, you can get exact measurements for that one, and update the item on the web.

In addition, adding a 'pound' for items that cost more to pack and ship can cover your cost of packaging and/or extra insurance.