Home » Ecommerce » Getting Accurate Shipping Rates

Getting Accurate Shipping Rates

shipping ratesIf you own an ecommerce store and provide real time shipping rates you have likely encountered a long list of issues with returning accurate rates. If you have not, Bravo good sir or madam! You are the exception. Having real-time shipping rates on your online store is a must these days. People have to know how much they are paying for shipping. If you’re one of the ubiquitous free shippers out there then you have successfully circumvented this conundrum. If not, you likely struggle to find some kind of rhythm to match the rates provided on your website and the rates you actually pay when you ship the product.

A difference in carriers and characters.

We find the most with UPS. They seem to not be able to get it together and match their online rates to their Worldship desktop module or their web interface. Almost without fail we have to significantly adjust their returned rates to have them at least be close to what is actually coming out of the owners pocket for shipping costs.

How Frustrating

Their customer support on this issue is nonexistent. Fedex seems to do a much better job at returning real time rates and having them match their given rates once you actually ship. We have had virtually zero problems with their API (an API is a set of code that communicates with the Fedex servers to get those real time rates). USPS and DHL are about the same. Not quite as easy to set up as Fedex but they return accurate rates for the most part. USPS makes things super easy if you’re selling media that can be shipped in their flat rate boxes. Pretty simple and you don’t need to connect to their server to know the price.

More Web Design Blog Content

CSS Evolution

Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS revolutionized the way the web was/is written. The next evolution has been the roll out of CSS3. With all kinds of new tricks, CSS3 promises to take web programming to the next level … and beyond. We generally hand code all of our

How To Win Visitors And Influence Traffic

Is there anything more of a turn-off than a untrustworthy website? Not in our world. Increasing the trust in your website is key to making conversions (calls, emails…. sales … you know, money). There are a number of factors determining the level of trust on your website. Here’s

Haile’s Angels Pet Rescue has a New Website

Customized WP theme – a great choice for a great organization. Haile’s Angels continues to do some great work in our community focusing on our four legged friends. They take in a good number of pets each month and try to find them forever homes. As a no-kill

Howe Development Has a New Website

Website is complete on Howe Development. Now for phase 2 – integrating a simply, custom CMS so they can update content on parts of the site. No need for wordpress – we can easily do a custom solution for those cases where a client only needs to control

A Blog you say, Like We Have Time!?

Well, it’s finally happened. A Gainesville Web Design Company made a wordpress blog and started posting to it in “third person” sort of way. Original, we know. We will hopefully have some interesting things to say between keywords, so just sit back, relax, and chew on some web

gainesville website SEO company

✈️ New Website Launch: University Air Center Soars to New Heights Online

We’re proud to announce the launch of the new and improved website for University Air Center — Gainesville’s premier full-service FBO, flight training, and aircraft maintenance hub. With a sleek new design and streamlined navigation, the new uac.aero offers pilots, students, and aviation professionals a faster, more user-friendly