UPS Shipping Plugin is often grossly wrong on shipping charge

-- HikaShop version -- : 4.3.0
-- Joomla version -- : 3.9.22
-- PHP version -- : 7.2
-- Error-message(debug-mod must be tuned on) -- : n/a

I have a client that uses UPS exclusively. They have been struggling with their UPS shipping plugin charges for some time, but recently they have had ever worse luck with aggregated orders, where the shipping costs were almost double of the real charge. They only ship UPS ground.

I was wondering if there was some trick to avoiding overcharges on compound orders. I am not sure yet (I'll be doing some tests soon) but I suspect that one of the issues is that while multiple products can easily be placed in the same box during shipping, the UPS plugin is not capable of making that assessment and charges full price for each product, or at least charges more than the actual cost is.

Here are some of the settings in the plugin, in case they make a difference:

Negotiated rate: NO
Group packages Yes
Show ETA No
Include prices Yes
Exclude dimensions Yes
Weight approximation 20%
Dimension approximation 20%

Percentage 2%
Use price per product No

I am especially curious about the "Negotiated Rate". The client doesn't know if they have one or not, so I set it to NO, could that be affecting the pricing?

I'd appreciate any feedback on this issue, thank you.

Hello,

Firstly, note that the Weight/Dimension approximation options will add 20% of the current value to the package as you configured it.

Regarding the price, Hikashop will only send information about your customer's order like the weight / dimensions / address, and will only displayed the response returned by the UPS platform.
Also, some of our customers contacted us so weeks ago regarding USPS price increase which was due to COVID19 :
about.usps.com/newsroom/national-release...y-price-increase.htm
UPS seem to do the same things with their rates :
www.ups.com/us/en/shipping/rates-update.page

Regarding the negotiated rates, the best way will be to directly contact UPS to have more information about it, as we don't have any way to know if your account have access to negotiated rates.

Kind regards,
Mohamed.

Thank You, I actually did not configure the UPS plugin and I was wondering what that 20% approximation was. I have now reduced it to 5% (assuming it was there for a reason) and I'll test to see what happens.

What do those Approximation do exactly?

Hello,

Both the "Approximation" options will add or reduce a percentage of the weight / dimensions to the total.

For exemple a "Weight approximation" set to "20" will add 20% of the weight to the total, and if you set it to "-20" it will reduce the total weight by 20%.

Kind regards,
Mohamed.