Real Time Rates

Overview

Squirrelcart supports obtaining real time shipping rates (RTR) for:

USPS - Using either Endicia or USPS Web Tools.
UPS
FedEx
Canada Post
Australia Post.

This greatly reduces the time spent managing your shipping rates.

How it Works

Customer adds item to cart and clicks checkout
Customer specifies shipping address and clicks continue
Squirrelcart sends a request to shipping courier requesting rates
Shipping courier returns rates
Squirrelcart presents rates to customer

Steps 3 through 5 all happen behind the scenes without customer interaction.

Enabling Real Time Rates

In order for real time rates to work, Squirrelcart needs to know the weight of your products, your company's address, and what shipping services you want to use.

Enable Real Time Rates for your courier.
- For USPS, see the Endicia or USPS Web Tools topics
- For FedEx, see the FedEx Web Services topic
- For UPS, see the UPS Developer Kit topic.
- For Australia Post, see the Australia Post topic
- For Canada Post, see the Canada Post Sell Online topic
Enable the shipping services you wish to use.
Perform a test rate lookup in the control panel to make sure communication is working. You can do this by clicking Shipping > COURIER NAME > Rates & Services.
For real-time rates to be returned, your product records must have their shipping settings configured in one of two ways. See the "Configuring real time rates for all enabled services" and "Configuring real time rates for a specific service / product" sections under Example Configuration on this page.
Test
To test, add an item to the cart in your storefront. Continue through checkout, specifying a valid shipping address. If real time rates are working, you should be shown rates for the courier you enabled. If they fail, enable diagnostics mode to watch the data sent to your courier, and the response they return.

Virtually Packing Items

For products that have the Pack Method shipping setting set to combine, Squirrelcart will virtually pack the items to determine the weight of each package for the purposes of obtaining real-time rates. It does this using the Max Pkg Weight setting in the Checkout Settings > General Settings fieldset on the Store Settings page. This setting acts as a cutoff. Squirrelcart will not allow the package weight for any virtuall package to excede this value.

The recommended setting for this is 70 lbs.

Warning - Setting this to a value over 70 lbs will cause USPS rate lookups to fail. Setting this to a value over 150 lbs may cause rate lookups for other couriers to fail.

Padding Real Time Rates

If you need to add an amount to the real time rates returned by a courier to account for packaging, follow the steps below.

For all Rates Returned by a Courier

You can pad all the real time rates returned for a particular courier by a set amount or a percentage. Just enter the amount you wish to pad by in the Pad RTR By field on the courier's record under Shipping > Couriers in your control panel.

For Individual Shipping Methods

You can pad all the real time rates returned for individual shipping services by a set amount or a percentage. If you are also padding rates at the courier level (see above), any padding done at the shipping service level takes precedence. Just enter the amount you wish to pad by in the Pad RTR By field on the shipping service's record under Shipping > Services in your control panel.