UPS Shipping Rates

The system can communicate with UPS in real time to provide customers and employees shipping rates and delivery times for each order.

Topics covered in this document:

Overview

Here is a quick overview of the features available with the UPS integration for real-time shipping rates:

• Customers can view shipping options, costs, and delivery times from UPS during checkout.

  

• Customers can preview the "estimated shipping cost" for their order on the cart page. The customer is prompted to enter their state and postal code, and then the least-expensive shipping option cost will be shown.

  

• Employees can select which UPS shipping options to allow their customers to select.

• Employees can view the same real-time UPS rates that customers see for an order in the administrator.

• The rates shown can be based on retail UPS rates or negotiated rates for your UPS account. Additional weight or costs can be added or subtracted from options to cover packaging or handling based on settings in the administrator.

• The integration supports drop shipping. If items in the order come from multiple suppliers that are flagged as drop shippers, the order can be split into separate shipments when querying UPS, since the items in the order will be coming from multiple origins.

How to Set Up the Connection with UPS

First, to connect your system to your UPS account, follow the steps here: How To Connect With UPS.

Specifying the UPS Options Customers Can Select From

Employees can control which UPS shipping options are available for customers to choose from during checkout. To review the options, navigate to the main carriers list. Next to UPS, choose "Shipping Methods" option under the three-dots menu.

On the UPS shipping methods screen, check or uncheck the "Is Selectable By Customers" field to control whether or not customers can select it.

The shipping method must be both active and "Selectable By Customers" to appear to customers during checkout. Apart from this, the method might not appear to customers if UPS does offer the option based on the weight, destination, or other parameters associated with the order. For example, international shipping method will not appear if the order is for a domestic US address.

If you wish to hide a particular shipping method from customers, but still allow employees to use it, set the "Is Selectable By Customers" flag to false, but leave the "Is Active" flag on.

UPS Rating Settings

A number of settings that control the requests to UPS for shipping rates are adjustable in the administrator. Visit the UPS Settings screen, and "Rating Settings" section.

• Some of the settings correspond to parameters in UPS API. For full explanations, the official UPS documentation can be helpful: https://developer.ups.com/en-us/catalog/rating/view-rate-spec/ratingversionrequestoption

• The "Extra Weight" setting tells the integration to add a certain amount of weight (in pounds) to each package sent in the API request, for example to cover packaging. This value is added to the total of the products' weights in the order. This setting is defaulted to one pound. UPS must have a weight in order to provide rates. If you have not defined any weights for your products, it will send "1" for each package's weight so customers see a response with options. We suggest you define each product's weight (in the Products area of the administrator) to get the most accurate rates from UPS, and use this setting to represent the typical weight of your packaging.

• The "Extra Charge" value is a dollar value added to each shipping rate returned by UPS. This could be used to cover, for example, typical handling charges you wish to pass on to the customer that are not reflected in the UPS rates.

Viewing UPS Options and Rates for an Order in the Administrator

An employee can view all the rate options for an order in the administrator by clicking the "UPS - Retrieve Rates for Order" link under the order.

Clicking the link will query UPS in real time for all of the enabled service options and display them in a table. Doing this will not update the order's shipping cost or anything else on the order. It is only for reference/informational puposes.

Drop Shipping Support

The UPS integration also supports drop shipping. For more details, visit the Drop Shipping page.