USPS Shipping Plugin always gives Parcel Rate

-- HikaShop version -- : 4.0.1
-- Joomla version -- : 3.9.1
-- PHP version -- : 7.2.13
-- Browser(s) name and version -- : Chrome

I use the USPS plugin to calculate international shipping on my site. My products are small, so shipping is a large percentage of the total cost on international shipments, and it's really affecting my sales.

I have it configured to use First Class: Flat, but regardless of the item weight and size, I always get the much more expensive shipping rate for a regular parcel. (For shipments where Parcel is the expected rate the plugin is working as expected.)

I've been over the settings numerous times, but can't find anything wrong. I have correctly set the dimensions and weight for each product I'm testing. I've also tried lowering them to miniscule levels just to see if I could affect a change, with no success.

For now, I have set a separate manual shipping plugin for Flats, but this is far from optimal as it doesn't account for USPS size restrictions on-the-fly.

Please see attached screenshots.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hello,

The USPS shipping plugin will only :
- Send details about your order details (Products weight/dimensions, shipping address, ...)
- Retrieve and display rates returned by the USPS shipping platform

Setting different values through "First class mail type / Container / Use product dimension" options will eventually change prices returned from the USPS platform.
Also enabling other international "Shipping services" can also be a good thing to see if there's another cheaper service.

Kind regards,
Mohamed Thelji.

That, I suppose is my point. I have the correct values, I know what the outcome from USPS should be, but the API is not returning that value.

I suspect the issue lies in the data being passed to the API.

From the USPS documentation, it mentions that for the field "RateV4Request / Package / Container" that "Use to specify special containers or container attributes that may affect postage; otherwise, leave blank." However, the plugin doesn't allow a blank entry option for that field. So, the Container field is populated in all cases and the settings for First Class are therefore ignored.

Is there a way I can see the output from the API? I tried turning debug on, but didn't see a change even with reporting on Development.

Thank you.

Hello,

Is there a way I can see the output from the API? I tried turning debug on, but didn't see a change even with reporting on Development.

Sure, you'll just have to use the "Debug" mode option of your USPS shipping configuration page to see what's sent to and returned from the USPS shipping platform through the HTML code of your checkout workflow (pressing F12 will do the job).

Kind regards,
Mohamed Thelji.