IQComputing Alex

@neee Hello,

When you decide to pack your products into Custom Packing Boxes, the Box Price will be added on top of the returned shipping estimate. This is supposed to allow Store Owners to add an anonymous upcharge to shipping cost which should help them cover the real-world cost of their packing boxes.

If you do not use Custom Packing Boxes, the system will pack items individually based on their individual product dimensions and weight. The returned rates will be based on that individual packing. Custom Packing Boxes will also use your product dimensions, but try to fill the Box Dimensions based on the Total Box Volume.

The system doesn’t pull in the ShipStation Packing Boxes, but in a future update we do plan on integrating this as a feature. If your ShipStation ships with Packing Boxes then you may want to match those same dimensions.

@neee Hello,

Thanks for giving our lil plugin a try, we’re sorry to hear you’re having trouble with it but let me see if I can help out here. Some thoughts on why these issues may be happening:

1. On the Integration Settings page, where you set the API Key, have you selected and saved the carriers you want to use?
2. On the Shipping Zone which you created and selected Live Rates for ShipStation, have you selected and saved the carrier services you want to use?
3. Next, you may also want to try clicking the Clear Cache button on the Integration Settings page in case there are any cached values sticking around.
4. Finally, if all else fails, you may enable Logging on the Integration Settings page at the bottom. The next time you attempt a checkout, the API callbacks will be logged under WooCommerce > Status > Logs (live-rates-for-shipstation). This may give you more insight on what’s happening if you see any [debug] or [error] flags in the logs.

Hopefully using the above you’re able to get this working on your store, but if you have tried the above and are still running into issues, please reply back to this thread and we can try to assist further. Have a wonderful rest of your week!

Hello @ifixwoocommerce

The big thing is that this plugin needs API Access to ShipStation. Their updated Standard Plan appears to have API Access, so long as that’s the case it should be fine. I believe our verbiage of “Premium” in this context just meant that their API Access is not free and comes at a “Premium” cost to users.

Feel free to give it a try and let us know how it goes!

Hello @centuryperf

The dimensions and weight look correct regarding what’s recorded in WooCommerce vs the ShipStation estimate.

Could this be a Warehosue issue since the plugin uses the Store Address as the base for the estimate?

Hello @marstarcanada

We just wanted to give you an update on this issue. We have been in touch with the ShipStation API Team and they have verified that this appears to be a bug within the API itself. Unfortunately, they have also informed us that their API is currently in a Code Freeze until the start of next year, so there is no ETA on when this may be fixed and we also don’t have a fix for this since there is currency conversions involved.

We will have to follow up with them early next year regarding this issue.

Hello @jordonrupp

We hope to implement ShipStation Warehouses soon, where you could set a global Warehouse on the Integration page, then override it per Shipping Zone. This would allow you to set the fulfillment addresses in ShipStation and the plugin would use those, then eventually fallback to the WooCommerce store address if needed.

Disclaimer: We take no responsibility for any suggested custom development. Use any code or suggestions below entirely at your own risk.

In the meantime, you may be able to use a combination of hooks to apply this kind of update. Our plugin uses WC()->countries->get_base_postcode() to pull in the Shipping Request address:

'from_country_code'	 => WC()->countries->get_base_country(),
'from_postal_code'	 => WC()->countries->get_base_postcode(),
'from_city_locality' => WC()->countries->get_base_city(),
'from_state_province'=> WC()->countries->get_base_state(),

These values do have filter hooks like woocommerce_countries_base_postcode – You may see the full list of hooks below:

https://woocommerce.github.io/code-reference/files/woocommerce-includes-class-wc-countries.html#source-view.250

To ensure that these are temporarily changed (via filter hooks) you may use the following 2 action hooks to add and remove the Store Location filters:

woocommerce_before_get_rates_for_packages and woocommerce_after_get_rates_for_packages

These 2 action hooks run before and after the calculate_shipping() method is called on Shipping Methods.

In theory, you would hook into the before – possibly check against the Shipping Method ID (Shipping method is passed as 2nd param) – and add_filter() for the updated store address values. Then, you could hook into the after and remove_filter() to ensure that it doesn’t affect anything else on your store.

Hopefully this temporary measure works for you while we implement Warehouse support. If you have any questions, or run into any issues, please reply back to this topic and we can assist further. Have a wonderful rest of your week!

@marstarcanada Thanks for the additional information, and apologies that the latest update broke your development changes, that’s always frustrating.

We’ll continue to look into the GLS issues, but are open to any suggestions or insights. Could you verify that within your ShipStation account you are able to get GLS rates?

You may be able to achieve this by manually creating an order with in ShipStation that matches the package dimensions you are seeing within your WooCommerce Orders.

Are you using the GLS Canada carrier as linked below?

https://www.shipstation.com/partners/gls-canada/

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To give some insight on the v1.1.0 updates, the ship rate IDs/codes are MD5 hashed values of the ShipStation Carrier Code and ShipStation Carrier ID. In previous versions we were grouping the rates keyed by just the Carrier Code ups but found that when users had manually connected carriers (such as UPS) rates were being overwritten due to the ShipStation Carrier Code and the Manually Connected Carrier Code being the same key. (View on Github)

Hello @robersw

When setting up the Shipping Zone, in Product Packing row you may select the “Pack items into one package derived from products” option. This will display a new row underneath where you can select “Total weight”. This will retrieve shipping estimates from ShipStation based on the total cart weight.