Hello,
I’m in need of a Freight Calculator to determine the cost of shipping pallet loads of supplies, LTL or FTL for an ecommerce.
Will I need to hire a programmer to create a custom made design? Or are there add-on modules that allow this finally in 2010?
I am currently doing the old school way, emailing, I don’t really have a sole account with one particular company because I get a price from various companies, then I grab the cheapest. Isn’t there Software that can do all this instantly??
Yes, LTL Freight has simpler methods, because of less number of parameters.
First, you need to gather full data on all dimensions to all possible destinations.
Fuel costs
Distance/Area
Type of truck to use
Volume
Weight
Time
Frequent customer discounts
any other parameters or your policies
Then, you can make a formula and a simple app to call it, and get the real time calculations. You need to test of each possible destinations with various loads - to make sure that the calculations are realistic.
When your costs vary, you can simply change your parameter, and new rates will apply.
If there is not any free application to automate this process, you will have to make it definitely. Think simpler - Just try to map your real calculations process to the application you will make.
Some other references are at:
UPS: http://ltl.upsfreight.com/shipping/publicrating/index.aspx
Freight Quote: http://www.freightquote.com/
Take a look on their business processes.
Thank you for the reply, however, I was talking more about LTL Freight, not UPS and FEDEX, if I’m understanding your post correctly.
It seems like it is almost impossible to implement this feature to get LIVE quotes because trucking companies take about an hour to retrieve a quote.
The only thing I can do is Estimate the price per area / state based on a weight and dimension for every area (Zip Code)? it will take months to do, but is this my only solution?
Thanks,
Which commence tool you use? Zencart, Magento and several others come with integrated modules to calculate the charges, and you can customize it to fit your business.
Customized, Shipping calculation was one of my major project for a handicrafts exporting business.
See some related things at the blog.. It looks like shipping calculator is complex. But it is, and it is NOT either.
While almost all of the shippers have their online APIs, none of them was useful to the business. Most of the ecommerce applications come integrated with their modules where you will just have to configure it to use.
But, shipping calculations can be too hard for the beginning, as was in my project - due to several reasons like specialized discounts, extra taxes to the government, discounts to particular countries only. Changes in surcharges and several other parameters. Plus different kinds of calculations used by the different shippers.
If you meet the standard criteria of the shippers pricing strategies, it is easier for you. If not, and you want to sell more, give more shipping business to the shippers, and keep shipping chargers as low as possible and help to benefit the customers - it can be relatively painful at the beginning - but fruitful and valuable - which even helps the shippers.