USPS changes effective July 28th, 2013

Applies to: AbleCommerce 7

Release Date:  7/28/2013

Severity: Normal

NOTE:  Another update was made for USPS changes.

NOTE:  THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN ARCHIVED

INFORMATION

The United States Postal Service notified it's customers of an API update and service name change effective July 28th, 2013.  

Reference https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/welcome.htm for more information.

The USPS integration requires the service name in AbleCommerce to match the service name designated by USPS.  If a name match is not found, services and rates will not be returned at checkout or with the shipping estimator.  To ready yourself for the change, apply the download provided below on July 28th, 2013, and follow instructions to update the service names.

IMPORTANT:  This update needs to be applied no earlier than July 28th, 2013.

DOWNLOADS

USPS CHANGES

The result of this change includes updates to several service names, and also the information received by the shipping request.

Update the USPS service names

1) - Access the AbleCommerce admin, and go to the Configure > Shipping > Methods page.

2) - Remove all USPS shipping methods currently in use.

3) - Add the desired USPS shipping methods and configure as needed.

4) - If needed, you can update the Test Server URL on the Configure > Shipping > Integrated Carriers > USPS configuration page to http://stg-production.shippingapis.com/ShippingApi.dll

      The Live URL has not changed.

IMPORTANT: When you add new shipping methods, you'll notice that each method will now have 6 variants, USPS will return one of those depending on the scheduled delivery date calculation between the origin and destination zip codes. Possible values: “1-day”, “2-day”, “3-day”, “military”, “apo”, etc. So, it's recommended to configure all variants for a service/shipping method you want to configure.

NOTE: In case you get an error message "A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected" while configuring the USPS shipping methods/services, update your ~/web.config as under. For .NET 4, we need to add requestValidationMode="2.0" to the httpRuntime configuration section of the web.config file like the following:

<httpRuntime maxRequestLength="4096" requestValidationMode="2.0"/>