Hi, our Cart is configured with our company's UPS and USPS user names to give shoppers real-time shipping rates.

We use PayPal Shipping to purchase our shipping labels, since this currently gives us lower rates, and it gives PayPal evidence of prompt shipping in case of any chargebacks.

Our UPS user name returns the exact fees charged by UPS (via PayPal) for each label, but our USPS user name returns rates that are 20-35% higher than the rates charged by PayPal Shipping.

I entered a ticket with PayPal to ask how its merchants are integrating to get the correct rates, and was given this unhelpful reply:

PayPal validates rates with Pitney Bowes, not USPS directly. Additionally, the rates that are quoted are commercial base rate. We currently do not have an API that provides rates that are quoted to us from Pitney Bowes upon which is gathered from USPS. […snip…] As this is not a bug related item nor an item that PayPal directly supports, this ticket will close.

Since the percentage difference between the USPS real-time quotes and the net fee charged by PayPal Shipping varies widely, it doesn't seem like a solution to apply a flat discount to every USPS label.

Can anyone suggest a way for our Cart integration to get correct, real-time PayPal Shipping rates for USPS labels?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

- Paul D.

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Edited to add:

It appears that Pitney Bowes has tools to access its "combasprice API" that presumably returns the discounted USPS rates charged by PayPal:

https://www.pitneybowes.com/us/ecommerce/shipping-apis.html

Am I right that tying into this API is likely to be a huge effort for our Cart developers, with too few potential users?
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There is a parameter you can set to discount the USPS rates by a percentage and get it pretty close.

https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/phphelp/ecommplus/parameters.asp#discship

quote:

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Discount online shipping rates. (Minimum version 6.3)

If you want to set percentage discounts / increments per shipping carrier use the parameters...

$discountshippingups=-10;
$discountshippingusps=5;
$discountshippingfedex=20;
$discountshippingdhl=-15;

...where -10 will discount the online shipping rate by 10% and 5 will increment the online shipping rate by 5%.

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David

Thanks for this, Dave.

Looking at some of the USPS API documentation (https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/rate-calculator-api.pdf), does anyone think it might be possible to develop a mod that sets the a tag such as IntlRateV2Request / Package / CommercialFlag to return the commercial base postage fees charged by PayPal Shipping, instead of the full retail rates that are currently returned?