USPS, UPS, etc

I am about ready to go live with an instance of nopCommerce.  However, we are running into several live rate issues with USPS and UPS (and likely FedEx, too).  Opening the code, it is clear that for at least USPS, it seems unfinished.  There are restrictions to prevent it from calculating the proper rates below a pound (everything is rounded up), the rates call only works in "ALL" mode.  Trying to adjust it to have just Express, Parcel, and First Class throw API exceptions.

So, I have forked 1.8.0 from CodePlex for the moment and have started working on improvements to USPS (and plan improvements to UPS) to make it much more admin configurable.  I am about 35% through USPS, but there's a great deal more that needs to be done there to get it to work correctly with the different shipping methods (look at the code and then read USPS's documentation and you'll see what I mean).

USPS has additional required XML tags based on the shipping method.  Express and Parcel work as-is, but First Class requires some additional information, and I believe so do at least one other that I tested.  Without them, the API returns an error, and the code as it stands now, just stops and displays the error when it should probably just skip over that rate and continue displaying rates.

In addition, the store admin really needs the ability to restrict these shipping methods as an envelope rate should never be returned under any circumstances if that store owner doesn't use envelopes for anything.  If Length / Width / Height is entered, I think it will restrict it, but that may also be a defect that I saw with the current state of the code.

So, two questions:

1. Is the nopCommerce development team working on improvements in this area?

2. Would the community at large benefit from these feature additions enough to be re-integrated once I am finished and nopCommerce has a chance to review them?  I'm not going to sell these changes, BTW.

1. No
2. You're always welcome to contribute your changes

It would be very nice to be able to select what shipping rates you offer to your customers. Some rates do not apply to us but still come up.

If would also be nice to be able to add a handling charge to FedEx, like there is for USPS and UPS. They all love tacking on a surcharge for two to your bill that is not in their rates. A dollar amount is good, but a % would be better for a Surcharge.

I was looking through the forums looking for information on this. Yes the community (me, so far) would be very happy to see this incorporated.

nopCommerce team | a.m. wrote:

This is great.  UPS works, but USPS is still unfinished and there are still values not being passed at all in the XML that are required by USPS based on the method you are requesting rates for.  If you apply that version as-is, it will not return any rates.  It throws the error "Missing value for Service."  I am going to continue to debug that.

msumerano wrote:
It works fine for me. Please post your result after debugging here

This looks great. I will have to check these out.

It would be nice if there was the same thing with a handleing charge for FedEx.

Great work.

msumerano wrote:
The modifications for selectable services for UPS and USPS make no changes to the request, they only filter on the response to only show rates that the store owner has selected. For USPS, ensure that "ALL" is uncommented for USPSStrings Elements.

.

edcorusa wrote:
https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/6909/fedex-selectable-rates-services.aspx

or for only the FedEx additional fee modification:
https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/3317/fedex-residential.aspx#28118

.