Couple suggestions for the cart, as vastly customizable as this cart is i run into a few small bothersome functions.

1 - On checking out, if i am offering both USPS - Residential GroundAdvantage and USPS - Commercial GroundAdvantage, no matter what ship to address the customer enters it allows them to select whichever option they want. This option pretty much couples in issue2 with the USPS GIS verification service and should therein disallow any shipment options not compatible with the address entered. (We set to only offer residential so we are covered on the higher side of the cost but have business customers that are starting to look elsewhere because increased displayed shipping prices.) Have the same issue with both UPS and Fedex displayed rates

2 - There is no built-in GIS address validation - this system is pretty much a standard in todays ecommerce world and most carts incorporate this in its base software. (I am aware there are alternate companies that offer a service such as smarty, but those charges rack up fast for a large scale website)

3 - Out of stock verse display but not sell online - we have products that are not shippable and available for instore pickup only - The problem is if say i set the product to not sell the message show is out of stock or use notify back in stock. While i am sometimes out of stock on normal items and WANT the customer to be notified when back in stock. My instore available only items are common big ticket sales and lets facer it people only see what is in front of them and since it says out of stock they move on to someone that has it in stock. (I realize i can setup instore/willpickup and couple that with email order but this is an option is flawed as a customer can select shipping but choose email order. The system just simply does not correctly process these things.

Hopefully this is not taken as a rant. Some carts we have used over the 40 years ive been doing excell at these things and some dont. I made the mistake of leaving ECT once before and have no intention of moving on again, but as versatile as it is. Adding these as improvements or includes options would put one more notch in your belt.

Thanks

All good points but.....

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3 - Out of stock verse display but not sell online

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You could create a custom css rule and apply it to those products so the out of stock button doesn't display



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I can confirm that UPS does consider commercial addresses and shows a lower rate accordingly.

Thanks,
David

Phil, While that is an option the system is not set to allow for either of these 3 options Backorder, Out of Stock AND Notify Back in Stock to function independently of each other. It becomes global choice and the global choice just does not suit todays needs.


David, I will confirm that the rates shown reflect correctly for commercial and residential, but that was not my point. The issue is when a customer enters a residential shipping address the system should NOT display commercial rates and vice verse, If a customer enters a commercial shipping address the system should NOT show residential rates. This is an industry ecommerce cart system standard. and id bank on it the reason is due to not being tied into any GIS data.

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the system is not set to allow for either of these 3 options Backorder, Out of Stock AND Notify Back in Stock to function independently of each other.

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Maybe I've misunderstood your requirements, but as I stated in my previous post, you can set a custom css rule and apply it to individual products so the out of stock, buy button, or any other element you wish to hide can be removed on a per product basis.

Would that not suit your requirements?



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David, I will confirm that the rates shown reflect correctly for commercial and residential, but that was not my point. The issue is when a customer enters a residential shipping address the system should NOT display commercial rates and vice verse, If a customer enters a commercial shipping address the system should NOT show residential rates. This is an industry ecommerce cart system standard. and id bank on it the reason is due to not being tied into any GIS data.

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Hi, I expect with postal, the full address may not be sent through the API request, just the zip code.
It may be possible that the folks with ect can see if there is an update to the API to pass the full address, if that's not the case currently, so your suggestion is valid.

However, when it comes to address validation,
Good address validation is not free and free address validation is not good.

Currently on the customer facing side, we use Smarty, and we are able to leverage a few features to keep those costs in check. They are the best at autocomplete and verify to the suite/unit level, where virtually no others do, at least not any free services.
On the back end, we use the free UPS address validation API and Melissa Data, which has the most comprehensive address validation, at a very low cost, but they do not have a good autocomplete service.
Mostly we use these tools to avoid address correction fees from UPS, but with Melissa Data, we get some value with fraud detection.

Thanks,
David

want to touch back on this post regarding address verification. maybe this could be looked into as it seems USPS offers this premade code.

https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/welcome.htm#developers

When using chrome find on page
Verify an Address

Quoted from this page part
Save time and money by reducing shipping errors due to incorrect address entry. This tool corrects errors in street addresses, including abbreviations and missing information. It also supplies a ZIP+4® Code.

If you use the new PayPal Checkout integration, you can take advantage of free Shipstation integration in PayPal that automatically populates your labels, validates and optionally corrects the address, and steeply discounts your UPS rates compared to what most sellers can negotiate with UPS.

Note that some sellers with very high shipping volumes (e.g., dbdave) have said that the PayPal-Shipstation rates are higher than their negotiated rates; however for us the PayPal-Shipstation rates are a very significant improvement.

One real shock was PayPal's rates for UPS Worldwide Expedited shipments from our US facility to Canada; we're now paying in the US$ 40 range to ship most ~8 Lb orders to addresses close to Canadian urban centers, vs. typically well above $100 for our old negotiated rate.

ETA: those lower UPS Worldwide Expedited rates have been a godsend, but we always notify customers outside the US that shortly after delivery they'll get a separate UPS invoice, by mail, for customs duty plus around a ~$10 UPS service fee.

Buyers who ignore that invoice eventually get harassed by third-party collection agencies.

Yes Paul, something has changed with the UPS ship station rates and for lightweight residential packages, I'm seeing rates well under 10 bucks.
I guess I will start using their rates for some of my shipments.
In my testing before, I just about always had better rates.

Plus UPS just said they will start charging a 2% for for paying with a card, which I earn cash back rewards, and with my spend, that's $5,000 per year I will lose by not paying with a card.
So I told my rep about the ship station rates and I think I will take about $100,000.00 per year from UPS by switching my lightweight shipments to the S/S account.

David

Wow, Dave, that's good to know.

BTW, the PayPal-Shipstation integration has discounted shipping labels not only from UPS, but also slightly discounted US Postal Service labels, and DHL.

We haven't used DHL - mainly because we've had issues with the unreliable (not in uniform) subcontractors they use here for delivery and pick up - but at some point we should probably compare those discounted DHL rates to UPS for export shipments.

ETA: the integration requires you to choose one "ship-from" address, which is too bad because we'd love to use those discounted UPS rates to ship from our separate office address.

Here's the PayPal overview of that integration:

https://help.paypal.shipstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/360061609111-PayPal-Shipping-Center-Overview

It's understood that changes to shipping processes can be difficult.

However our shipping personnel immediately liked the PayPal / ShipStation workflows.

Our big complaint with this integration is that PayPal won't provide credentials for the cart to query those discounted rates.

Since our current UPS Ground rates through PayPal / ShipStation currently average around 40% lower than our old negotiated rate, our only workaround has been to query our negotiated rate and add a line in the 'includes.php' file to give an across-the-board discount, like:

$discountshippingups=-40;

Note that you could see more or less than a 40% cost reduction for UPS Ground, depending on your current negotiated rates.

Because our UPS rates shown in the cart are now approximated, we have to sanity-check our shipping fees every few weeks to make sure they're in line with costs. We typically make or lose a few cents on every UPS Ground order but overall recover close to our net cost.

While UPS Ground shipments are pretty consistently around 40% off our negotiated rates, UPS' Next Day Air, Second Day Air, and Worldwide Expedited rates have far bigger discounts.

Our cart is configured to authorize orders, so that we manually capture the funds once items are ready to ship.

For shipments to Canada, the authorized amount (determined by querying our negotiated rate less the discount configured in our includes file) can be up to US$ 100 too high. The PayPal shipping screens allow us to quickly create and discard "pro-forma" labels to find the true cost, then reduce the shipping fee captured in the cart.

That makes export orders more difficult to process, but of course our customers in Canada are delighted to learn that their charged shipping fees will much less than authorized.

Those erroneously high international shipping fees displayed in the cart definitely lead to high abandonment rated by customers outside the US.

But for domestic orders, those lower UPS Ground rates are an enormous help to compete with big resellers like Amazon.

If anyone has theories about how we might query those net discounted PayPal / Shipstation rates in the cart, we'd very much like to hear!

Thanks in advance.
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https://help.paypal.shipstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/360061609211-Address-Verification#UUID-5434dc78-285f-dc7d-6053-9820cc0bbf68

"To successfully create a label, you must have a valid Ship To and Ship From address on the order. Not to worry! The PayPal Shipping Center automatically verifies addresses for you when you click Calculate Rates or save an edit to a Ship To or Ship From address."

"Domestic US addresses are validated against the USPS address validation database, and international addresses are validated against the Melissa Database."

Again - all happening after the fact

I hear what your both saying, but none of those options provide the solution needed for correct addresses up front in the cart let alone displaying the discounted rates. as you can see they are also verifying against the USPS Address Validation database.

As much as I really did not want to have to rely on an aftermarket option, unfortunately the smarty option was really the only way to go - maybe in the future The cart could be scripted to work with either database system so its just automatic .

Hi Paul, I have a hack for the admin where you can set discounts for each service - but it's for .asp
I think it might be easy to adapt to .php though.
I don't remember f you are .asp or .php
Send me a message if you want to give it a try.

David

[deleted]

freewaytrailer

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As much as I really did not want to have to rely on an aftermarket option, unfortunately the smarty option was really the only way to go - maybe in the future The cart could be scripted to work with either database system so its just automatic .

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Smarty is the best of all address validations (auto complete) as it will validate to the suite/unit level and that is where we found the most problems.
People leaving off the suite or apartment number, then getting a bill from UPS for a silly address correction fee.

What we do is set smarty so it does not make suggestions until you type at least seven characters, so it cuts down on the number of queries and reduces billing.
Customers also enjoy the auto populate of the city/state/zip fields, saving them time.
I'm not a fan of paying for this either, but as I said before Good address validation is not free and free address validation is not good.

Thanks,
David

"What we do is set smarty so it does not make suggestions until you type at least five characters"


May I ask where this setting is on smarty, i could not find it

I think I just coded that in based on some recommendations from Smarty
It looks like I actually have it set to 7 characters too.
Really how many address out there consist of less than 7 digits - not too many.



I also stopped using their secondary API to get the +4 on the zip as it will cost you more money and ship station will add that +4 anyway.
Instead, we append the zip with -0000 so in the admin, we know they used the smarty tool and the address should be valid.

If I recall, I based my code off this - https://jsfiddle.net/smartystreets/uptgh7c8/ with some changes.

David

Thanks that will come in handy, are there any other tips for smarty you can recommend?

Hi, sure - in that link I disabled the

function getSingleAddressData

as what that does is once an address is chosen by the user, it sends off another API request that you must have a subscription too.
I dropped that one as I mentioned before.
When you disabled that, you must also removed (disable) the calls to that function, or erros occur.

I believe there are some settings to ensure you are pulling locations based on the users IP address and that will narrow the results and limit the API calls (expenses).

Last, there is a setting of how may results are returned in the list, and if I recall, this will reduce your calls to the API, saving you some money.

It's been a while since I revised all of this and I'm not sure my tips in the hall of fame are current.
I'll take a look.

Appreciated. Tyvm

Yes, my post in the tips and tricks is outdated it seems.
I'll try to get it updated soon.
David