Shipping prices?

[danima]

Hey folks:

Our company is relatively new to the Shopping Cart/E-business transaction world. We've built a few shopping carts in the past that were relatively simple (one product, or a few products). The shipping was relatively cheap and not a big deal to figure out. Here's my question.

How have you dealt with the shipping costs across a country in the past? I'm not sure what to do here. In Canada the cost to ship from here in Niagara to Vancouver is much different than to Toronto or to Quebec. The same would be true for New York or to California. I'm not sure how to set shipping prices up for this client. He has 4 products that will be sold across North America and overseas.

Any help or insight would be appreciated.

 

[sleipnir214]

It depends on your shipper.

UPS, for example, has a web service which can be handed origination, destination, and package information and return a shipping charge.

Most shippers can also give you their shipping cost tables.

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[danima]

So, how would you integrate the UPS system with a custom shopping cart?

 

[sleipnir214]

Since I do most of my web programming in PHP, I'd use cURL to send the data to the shipper and fetch the response.



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[danima]

We use PHP/MySQL as well. Not sure what you mean by the cURL?

 

[sleipnir214]

cURL: the Client URL libraries and associated PHP family of functions

http://php.he.net/manual/en/ref.curl.php

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[peterdeng]

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Regarding Damina's question, the cost depends on the shipping place, I am a Chinese, running one company in China, the shipping rate is always changable with the season, for example, one 40 ctnr to west coast of US has big difference in Sping and Fall, if you would like to further to know, reach me back at accentpeter@163.com ,Thank you

 

[dpk136]

The ups web service is exactly what you want to use. This is the easiest way to do this, and you have up to date pricing directly from UPS. If you are looking at fed-ex or another company, they probably have the same type of service.

David

David Kuhn
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http://www.davidpkuhn.com