Having problems getting accurate shipping charges through UPS.

I read through all of the support options in the admin panel and contacted UPS about setting up the UPS live shipping modules.

I have everything set up, but it's not giving me accurate shipping prices.
I have filled out the following information on the LIVE UPS SERVER INFORMATION page:

Zip
State
UPS License number (API key. If I use anything else I get an error)
Username
Password
And the rest

Here are some examples of the inaccuracies.

LBS - RATE - Negotiated rate from UPS site - rate on RTD
50 LBS - 17.66 - 13.51 - 18.26
17 LBS - 13.61 - 10.82 - 21.91
23 LBS - 14.07 - 11.20 - 18.19



I uploaded the ground shipping chart provided in the admin panel to see if it would be more accurate, and got the following rates

17LBS - 13.61 - 10.82 - 6.81


So it's lower. I have no modifiers set up, I'm just not sure why I'm not getting the same price I get from the UPS site.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/16/2016 01:32PM by user1986.

This is something that has no easy fix unfortunately. This issue is related to the changes UPS and FEDEX applied past year. You can find more details in here:
http://support.realtimedesigner.com/forum/read.php?1,6163

Hi user1986. We asked this same question at the beginning of last year when UPS and Fedex decided to move to dim weight calculations as USPS already had in practice. Alex had a great idea to perform some calculations which approximate dim weight results. It’s a backend function that Alex applied just to our company. I can report that it works good enough for our purposes to use against live USPS and UPS. We haven’t tested FedEx. There are a few caveats, and thus the reason Alex hasn’t made this experiment widely available. He would need to comment on that.

For most standard product scenarios in RTD we’ve found that by adjusting the weights of products and messing with the shipping modifiers we can get within a few dollars actual live shipping costs from the USPS and UPS api. If you don’t mind living with that variable, then this might be a solution for you. We are very satisfied with it within our normal product range. This is all within the RTD cart, so I can’t speak for how it would function for external cart use.

And now the caveats. It only works in UPS with Ground. As you may know, the charges for any expedited shipping in UPS are considerably more than USPS. Although, at anything under a certain dim weight (sry I don’t recall what that is) to more than half of UPS zones to your location, it doesn’t even matter. We have been negotiating with UPS for better rates on 2nd day, and they have agreed to a pricing table almost matching USPS. So that at least covers most of the USA in two or three days somewhat accurately. The good news is that this trick works with USPS Priority and Express mail very well.

There will be times when the calc is off more than expected, but for our purposes it isn’t that often. This is mainly due to orders that are large size or have mixed items with various sizes. We just tell ourselves "You win a few, you lose a few".

If this sounds like something that may work for you, maybe Alex would have some input here.