UPS Rates Much Higher Than expected

-- HikaShop version -- : 2.3.2
-- Joomla version -- : 3.4.3
-- PHP version -- : 5.3.29
-- Browser(s) name and version -- : Chrome 64-bit (Windows)
-- Error-message(debug-mod must be tuned on) -- : N/A

My client's website appears to be quoting rates much higher than expected.

For instance, a customer can purchase glow sticks that weigh 0.070lbs according to the product setup. If they order 300, yielding 21lb package, it will quote $57.34 for the shipping via UPS Ground. However, logging onto UPS's site directly and shipping a 21lb package comes to about $32, instead.

• Item Weight: 0.070lbs/ea x 300 items (21lbs)
• Negotiated Rate: Yes
• Group Packages: Yes
• Include Prices: No
• Exclude Dimensions: Yes
• Origin-Destination: 34101 to 02163

For an order that is only $153 of glowsticks, it's pretty crazy that almost $60 is added on top for shipping. My client is very confused, as am I.

As for troubleshooting, I've tried setting the dimensions to zero to make sure it's not accounting for package size, to no avail. I can't find any logging to determine what sort of criteria this quote is based upon.

Hello,

If they order 300, yielding 21lb package, it will quote $57.34 for the shipping via UPS Ground. However, logging onto UPS's site directly and shipping a 21lb package comes to about $32, instead.

This quote is based on the fact that you are ordering 300 products, in that case, the UPS shipping plugin is trying to group every products ordered on packages regarding the UPS limitations, so maybe the price difference is coming from the fact that UPS have its own way of grouping products into several packages.
Note that our UPS group packages algorithm is optimized to efficiently group the ordered products based on the size/weight limitations that are displayed on the UPS documentation, and after that, the UPS plugin will only display the rates that are returned from the UPS platform.
If you want custom made rates starting a number of products added to your cart, you can for example use a manual shipping plugin starting 200 products ordered for example, so that you can manually set the price.

Maybe I'm a bit thick.

So would it be better to turn of package grouping, or would disabling it make things even worse? Basically, weights on the marketplace are accurate but not all the package dimensions are accurate.

Hello,
By disabling the "Group package" option, your website will send to the UPS platform 1 package per products, I don't know if it will make things worse but at least it will send the information without applying our "Group package" in it.

Yeah, as I expected, disabling the grouping made it worse. A package that was Next-day air went from $214, which was about double what it should be, to over $700!

There's not too many knobs to turn on this plugin, I'm not sure where the difference is coming from. I'm pretty much stumped at this point. I didn't see anything in the last few versions' changelogs that would suggest a change in the calculations or anything, but do you know of any bugfixes related to this?

Hi,
Actually, we worked a lot to send what you exactly have in your cart, and we can't do more than the "Group Package" algorithm which is grouping the maximum number of products in the minimum number of package regarding the size/weight limits that they have added in their UPS documentation.
So without new limits or some personal modification on the UPS shipping plugin, we won't be able to do anything.

Even FedEx rates are also higher than what they actually should be. It must be something in the configuration but I don't see any smoking gun. Please provide any other thoughts you can, since this is likely causing my client business:

1. Here's the FedEx setup. Notice nothing for including pricing or package size



2. Here's the product in question. Nothing special about dimensions (which shouldn't factor in estimations) or weight



3. Here's HikaShops result (yes, this is for a package that weigh 8lbs!)



4. Here's FedEx's result




That simply cannot be right behavior.

Hello,
The problem that we have here is that in your situation and with our "group package" algorithm, your FedEx shipping method will split your 250 products on 12 packages so that we don't exceed any FedEx limitations that appeared on their documentation.
So they probably have better prices because they are free to group their products how they want, but in our case we can't do the same.
In fact, generally we should send our products 1 by 1 but we tried to at least optimize it.

Yes, I can definitely see how that's likely the cause.

One question though, shouldn't there really be three different options for shipping?

1. Grouping, weight, dimensions: Uses grouping algorithm along with weight and dimensions to estimate shipping costs within carrier constraints.
2. Weight only: Only uses weight to estimate shipping costs.
3. 1-to-1: Each item gets its own package

It seems like your grouping algorithm shouldn't be executing because it simply doesn't have enough information to do a good job w/o dimensional data. Right? Seems more straightforward to just request a quote merely based on weight. Right now the pricing is sometimes many multiples of the actual cost and very disruptive.


Thanks for your continued input and support Mohamed.

Hi,
1. 3. That's what we get when we enable/disable the "Group packages" options
2. The problem with that option, is that most of the shipping platforms won't accept products without dimensions, so an error will be returned without any rates.

But I actually just tried it and it correctly returned better FedEx rates when I unset the dimensions from my products.