Negotiated rates for Live UPS Shipping Rates

There's always something new to learn.
Today I learned about UPS's negotiated rates. I thought an account approved to use those would have automatically had them as rates from the Live UPS feature.
But obviously I was wrong! And so I found some extra data to be needed in order to retrieve eventual negotiated rates.
Today's update is precisely about this.

The place in admin panel is ONLINE PAYMENT OPTIONS => Shipping costs => UPS.
The new option is State you are shipping FROM under the "LIVE UPS SERVER INFORMATIONS" section.
It wasn't there before because for normal rates UPS only required weight and zipcodes.
So, if your UPS account is approved to use negotiated rates, all you need to do is to set also that new field.

It's something I tested with few accounts, so as usual be sure to test it properly if you're going to enable this in production.
Let me know if you'll notice anything wrong/strange/unusual.

Thanks, and Happy testing!

Alex, entered new state infromation, but still not getting negotiated rates. Sent screen shots up to Kyle. Any other ideas I might try?

I sent Kyle a reply for you, hopefully you'll get it soon.
In there I ask for some extra details. If there's nothing you feel to be sensible data, feel free to reply to it right here so that other users may join the discussion, if they feel so.
I'm sure this topic will be interesting also for other users using negotiated rates with UPS.

Alex, It appears it got our issue details got lost in the translation.
since we work with 3 seperate store fronts on multiple projects, we needed to identitfy who's number's fro shipping results were accurate. so as a default we went to the folks at UPS. If you go to UPS .com and configure a package using the quick time and cost methods and select Detail time and cost you can get the numbers that should match the API calcualtions. If you use your UPS number you will get negotiated rates, if you don't they will be retail rates. For our test we use 1lb 12x36x1 shipping and recieving to same address. This forces rate to top left on UPS GND rates. our Negotiated rate 5.96, Retail is 8.69.
whe configuring RTD with the same credentials it returns a negotiated rate of 8.72 in test mode and actual order calculation for shipping. On your example that you sent me, I see that you have 2 different rates, not sure if either is correct but you are correct that one is lower then the other.
In trying to figure out whats happening we do have a question and Potential solution to the problem. The question: Where does RTD pick up the ship from address of the company?. We cant find where we can actually palce a full address for where our store is located in the RTD admin. UPS is specifc to zip and in the RTD set up it only asks for the first 3 numbers of zip... I hope this helps. we really need to get this fix. Multiple store fronts with different shipping costs doesn't look good. Thanks Rob

Rob,

We've just spent a couple hours doing some in-depth testings.
We tried various combinations, comparing rates returned by your RTD and ups.com (accessing it with your data).
But there are some of the values you reported we weren't able to replicate at all.

Now: one thing I know is that it may happen that rates returned directly from your ups.com page and their XML may differ. As the point here is however to match the values you're obtaining from your other webstores, I'd say to completely discard what we can see in ups.com, and focus only on the other websetores (which, I guess, are using the XML method to get rates as well).

So, tomorrow you'll be contacted by Kyle or Mark Jr. You'll get a very detailed report about the tests we made today, and you will be asked for some more specific informations about the other webstores RTD should be compared with. I prefer not to ask extra details to you here about those to protect you biz privacy.

About your last paragraph: for XML requests, only the data into the LIVE UPS SERVER INFORMATIONS box are used.
All other fields, including the one asking only for the first 3 digits of the zipcode, are used exclusively for CSV pricing. So, that field is not used at all when doing requests to UPS directly.
All UPS needs to know about the shipper is the state/zipcode combination, which are asked as first field is the LIVE UPS section.

Alex
New issue and not sure if I should place this in a new topic. If the weight is less then .1lb on an order, no shipping method will be available. This is true whether using FedEx or UPS. If there was "Tare" weight for the box that we could place in the control panel it would allow for all shipments to exceed the necessary weight. there's not. the only other solution is to tell RTD that everything weighs more which really distorts things when products get designed bigger. Your suggestions would greatly be appreciated here. thanks Rob

Here is fine.
Less than .1lb.... what are you shipping, single toothsticks?

Well, back on topic. Doing a text the returned value is zero because Fedex can't mach such value (returned error is "Weight is missing or invalid" ).
At this point, I guess the best thing is to force a minimum. In any case, lowest rate is the one for 1lb.
So I did it. Now, if weight is lower than 1, I forced RTD to send carrier 1 as the value to calculate against anyhow.

Also error should be no more, plz confirm.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/16/2012 11:57AM by Alex.

Alex, thanks,
It still would be cool to add the box weight in there some where for more accurate shipping calculations. For now we'll just add the .XX cents to account for it. Tested and errors seem to be gone. Rob