weighing equipments

[loveday]

We have just completed building an ecommerce site for a client.

Only problem delaying the launching of the site is determining shipping and handling charges.

My client is a pharmaceutical company that sells, among other things, equipments.

Some of those equipments weigh as little as less than 1 lb (pound) or as much as 175 lbs (pounds).

According to my client, some put a maximum equipment weight at 150.

He has a couple of questions:

In the case where he has various weight levels, what is the best way to determine how much shipping and handling charges to add to a customer's order?

Second, how should he handle shipping and handling charges for an equipment that weighs over 150 going to states where the highest is 150?

No taxes are charged for medical equipments that he says because they are medicaid.

The launching of his business is being held up because of this.

Any suggestions, including sites that may provide a solution to this problem is greatly appreciated.

On a separate note, do you have to have a payment gateway to make online credit card transactions?

Shouldn't just having an ssl certificate on one's site take care of that?

Thanks in advance

 

[Tarwn]

Most of the major shippers have gateways now to handle providing shipping and handling information through third party sites. I'm not sure what the solution would be to ship a 175lb package into a location that has a maximum of 150, that might require private shipping (aka a trucking company), I don't know. Your best bet would be to check with shipping company sites to see what their tools can do for you. UPS has a "Business Solutions" section, Fedex likely has a similar section (as well as a special section for freight delivery greater than 150lbs). I'd also look into DHL, etc.
Most, if not all, of the major shippers will have somesort of gateway you can query for rates.

-T

 

[ChrisHirst]

the only sites that are likely to provide that information are the carriers/shipping companies that your client is going to be using.
If it's over the weight for one carrier service it probably won't be for another.

Having an SSL certificate doesn't mean the site can handle CC transactions, only that they are secure if one is set up. some form of CC processing is still required such as collecting the card and customer information, checking card validity, transfering funds, merchant accounts etc.

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[loveday]

Thanks Tarwn and Chris,

My client deals with UPS and according to him, it is *not* the carrier that puts restrictions on maximum weight capacity that can go into certain states; it is the shipping law of that state.

I must add here that UPS has a link that allows customers to weigh their items and determine how much shipping and handling that will cost them.

We are already providing them with the weight for each item but client feels it is too much trouble to send customer to ups to determine shipping and handling charges.

So he wants to know if approximating rates after the 150 pound threshold will cover his shipping and handling cost without overcharging the customer.

As fars CC transaction is concerned, I ask that question because we do have CC processing code put in place.

The CC transaction processing functionality has been implemented by us, tested and works.

We have a gateway provider, if I an not mistaken, it is you Chris who helped give me information about them - ViaKlix.

The problem we have with viaKlix right now is we want to provide them with the CC and customer information.

Their job should be to secure the transaction for us and we thought that if we collected customer info and send it to them via <form method=post action="

https://viaklix/process.asp">

that the transaction will be secure.

Instead they came back and told us that if we are to collect the CC and customer info, we *must* put SSL certificate on our site.

We feel that if that is the case, it defeats the purpose of having them as our payment gateway provider.

 

[ChrisHirst]

yep if you are collecting CC information and personal data then transfering it to a processor, the data collection and transfer has to be via a secure transaction. Best bet is allow the processor to collect the CC numbers. up to them to do all the validity and anti-fraud checks then.

If I remember after looking at UPS some time ago the weight limit is for standard delivery services. It's Health & Safety stuff mainly. You can send larger packages but they are subject to a extra charge. In the EU packages above 70lbs need Heavy Package Labels putting on.

I would assume that they would have a method in place to let clients send weight info and destination to a form and auto-query that for the prices. If not, you could scrape the form for the input names and write a gateway.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

http://www.candsdesign.co.uk

A website that proves the cobblers kids adage.

http://www.cram-system.com

Nightclub counting systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[loveday]

Sorry Chris, I had to give God Thanks - I went to church.

Chris said:
>Best bet is allow the processor to collect the CC >numbers. up to them to do all the validity and anti-fraud >checks then.

Well, I did try to get them to process the CC while we collect contact information but they said no.

We could allow them to collect both personal and CC info but the problem we have is that our client requires customer to register/login before checkout.

In other words, it is ok, for a customer to add items to his or her basket but as soon as the customer clicks on "Proceed to checkout", if he or she is neither registered or logged in, he or she is taken to login screen.

Our worry is that if we let them collect personal / credit card data from customer, that will require the customer to provide the same information twice - once on our site and once on payment gateway's site, and we don't want that to happen.

Any suggestions?