[thelist] fedex and ups tracking

[alan herrell - the head lemur]

I have not used or implemented FedEx, but have plowed down the UPS road.

Regarding UPS Tracking

Implementing it on a website is not difficult, but if you are 
implementing it for the client who is using World Ship, the UPS tool for 
shipping, replacing the book,  be advised that they *have* to use 
Internet Explorer to use the retrieval features, such as tracking in 
transit and history of packages.

As of 8 months ago, this was true. I have been *forthright* in my 
opinion to UPS on how stupid an idea this was on a number of occasions, 
but have met with no success.
One of the other gotchas is for the client who uses World Ship,is  you 
cannot save *what if* scenarios.

Example:

Jack emails looking for a part and you want to give him a bottom line 
figure. Trust me on this. You will have a much higher sales rate, by 
giving someone the bottom line, rather than a price plus a yet to be 
determined extra cost.

You know your price, and use WorldShip to compute the shipping charges, 
so you can email Jack to tell him that the part is 35 clams and shipping 
and handling is 17 clams, making it 52 clams at his door.

The problem is WorldShip will not let you perform this back of the 
envelope calculation and save it as a maybe. Once it gets done, it is 
going to generate the label, tracking number,and send UPS the End of Day 
report.

You either have to re-enter it later when you close the sale, requiring 
you to do twice the work, for the same sale, or go through a big hassle 
trying to get the same number, which from the public UPS site will vary 
wildly from what is produced in house.

I have had  *spirited* discussions with UPS about this as well, with the 
same results. Nada. Not Invented Here, etc.

Which is too bad, when you want get the client using FireFox, as part a 
client strategy of mitigating browser security disasters.
I have not tried changing the header info in Firefox, because there is 
no point.

Someday all this stuff will just work.


-- 
alan herrell - the head lemur
raving lunacy
http://theheadlemur.typepad.com