UPS Problem Solved - Kinda

[Guest]

When you go to the UPS site and try to calculate your package it automatically increases the weight depending on the Dimensional Wt. For example, I have a package that is 26LX25.5WX13.75H and 27lbs, so UPS calculates a Dimensional Wt. of 49lbs (plus it includes a fuel surcharge of 1.25% or $1.47). Zip To and From is 94014.

 

So, in order for me to correct the problem in the UPS module is to increase my wt. of the package to 49lbs, well lo and behold, my shopping cart is now correct, except for the ground rate (UPS is 11.39 and Shop Cart is 14.68).

 

But now, a bigger problem arises and that is my USPS rates are now off, because I increased the weight of my products on the shopping cart admin page.

 

It seems to me at this point that UPS and USPS are incompatible shipping modules, if you have odd sizes. A problem for me and not necessarily everyone else.

 

A gentelman, sent me a personal message about this problem and I indicated to him that he needs to test his shopping cart rates against the UPS rates to determine if it is a problem for him. I have odd size packages apparently and that is a big problem.

 

Anyone planning to fix this?????

 

My only real solution at this point is to remove UPS or USPS and I am inclined to remove the UPS shipping module at his time, until someone comes out with a real solution.

 

Too bad for me, but at least the problem has been uncovered and exposed. Now we just need someone to fix it.

 

 

Frank

[Guest]

FROM SOMEONE THAT I ANSWERED TODAY and thought community members should know:

 

Hi,

I have a question for you. I understant that I will need to provide to USPS product and dimesion information in order to let them calculate a shipping rate.

Where do you customize attributes for products? When I am creating a new product I do not have a possibility to enter these information.

 

 

Thanks for your help,

Tom

 

Tom,

 

That is correct. You do not put this information in the osCommerce shopping cart and there no place to put that information, other than "Product Weight".

 

What I was talking about is this (UPS - Estimate Cost):

 

1. If you go to www.ups.com it will ask specific information for you submit to get a postal rate estimate.

2. After you provide this information to ups.com it will calculate what your postal rate is and at the bottom of the ups.com page you will see "Dimensional Weight" and this is the weight measure that ups.com actually uses to calculate your postal rate. Sometimes it will not show a "Dimensional Wt", because it is not an odd shaped package, but if it is an oversized package and has an odd size, you will get a "Dimensional Wt.".

3. In order for your odd package postal rate to be correct on your shopping cart and match the ups.com rates, you need to go to your Admin page Catalog then Categories/Products - select your Product and enter the Products Weight that you got from ups.com "Dimensional Wt". If it is zero, you enter nothing.

4. Your rates should be fine now.

5. But if you are using other postal carriers, their rates will be bumped up also.

6. So this information is only if you are only going to use UPS as your exclusive postal carrier.

 

This is not pretty and is only meant for businesses that have odd size packages and a "Dimensional Wt" is being calculated by ups.com. If you do not get a "Dimensional Wt", then you do not have an odd oversized package.

 

Good Luck.

[Guest]

If this is really an issue for you, perhaps you should add another field to your products database for "Dimensional Weight." Then you could set the UPS shipping module to pull that field instead of the "weight" field, while USPS and all others use the standard "weight."

[Guest]

Chris,

 

Sounds like a good solution, but I do not have any real programmer expertise. I normally just hack at it and experiment. I would not know how to do this.

 

Any weight changes for my products under the Admin Tool would affect my rates for UPS. The change you suggest would required some coding that I am not capable of doing.

 

Thank You.

[Ki'rin]

I realize that this thread is probably long since dead but there is another way to alter the pricing based on the weight, though I can't say much for the accuracy as I'm having problems with differences in pricing from the module and the online UPS calculator even with this approach. Regardless, here it is:

 

In the UPS module there is the section where the request is sent out that has variables like

 

'10_action=' . $this->_upsActionCode,

'13_product=' . $this->_upsProductCode,

'14_origCountry=' . $this->_upsOriginCountryCode,

'15_origPostal=' . $this->_upsOriginPostalCode,

'19_destPostal=' . $this->_upsDestPostalCode,

'22_destCountry=' . $this->_upsDestCountryCode,

'23_weight=' . $this->_upsPackageWeight,

While looking online to find some information about the UPS API the dimensions appeared as an option, so I simple included them like so:

 

//the box dimensions

'25_length=' . $box_dimensions['length'],

'26_widht=' . $box_dimensions['width'],

'27_height' . $box_dimensions['height'],

 

I have some other logic that determines the box size, and number, but that is specific to the site, so don't mind the $box_dimensions array and simply use whatever variables you wish. According to the UPS API for the calculator that osCommerce uses, this should work. While hunting, however, I also noticed that UPS supposedly retired the calculator that osCommerce is using, which might explain my own problems at present.

 

If you want to avoid hard-coding the values you can add a configuration variable to the configuration table in the database. I guess this will be confusing for most (I had to beat my head up against osCommerce a fair amount myself) so I'll explain a little bit about. The configuration table has entries that are read in by php and created as defines that can be used in any of your scripts (I believe it is application_top.php that actually reads the values from the table) using the KEY as the name. You will notice that they are all capital letters to help distinguish them from normal variables. These values can be set in the configuration section of the admin backend of osCommerce. So, if you need a knew user-defined value you can simply add an entry to the configuration table. However, be sure to put it in appropriate configuration group (configuration group is another table) so you can find it on the backend (in this case I believe the configuration_group_id is 7). If you aren't too familiar with databases, this may not make a lot of sense, but I suppose an overview of the basics of databases is probably a bit much for this post. If you have any questions or you have a better way to solve this then feel free to email me at [email protected]

[katiediddesign]

So, in order for me to correct the problem in the UPS module is to increase my wt. of the package to 49lbs, well lo and behold, my shopping cart is now correct, except for the ground rate (UPS is 11.39 and Shop Cart is 14.68).

 

But now, a bigger problem arises and that is my USPS rates are now off, because I increased the weight of my products on the shopping cart admin page.

 

I am just setting up my cart/store, and I hadn't even thought about this until I read this thread. I mean... I knew the UPS has dimensional weights, and that I'd need to enter these instead of real weights for my problem items. I just hadn't gotten far enough to think about how it would mess up my USPS rates.

 

My thoughts on the matter are these, however... this issue will only affect my odd-sized items. For me, these odd-sized items are also the more expensive items... and therefore, items for which I would rather have the extra security that UPS offers through better insurance claim support and better tracking. And UPS's rates are better on heavier boxes.

 

So, in my case, I think that I will just leave the bumped up rates "as is." The higher weights will favor UPS shipping rates, which is what I would prefer the customer choose, in which case they will be accurate. And if the customer chooses USPS anyway, I will use the extra to purchase insurance and extra tracking, or set this aside in my own "shipping insurance" fund.