USPS changes effective July 28th, 2013

Applies to: AbleCommerce Gold

Release Date:  7/26/2013

Updated:  7/31/2013

Severity: Normal

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.

However, if you would like to apply the update before Sunday for testing purposes, then you can use the new Test Mode feature that is now included on the Configure USPS page which is made part of this update.  

The Test Server URL is http://stg-production.shippingapis.com/ShippingApi.dll

REVISION Information:

On July 31st, 2013, a new patch is released.  The only change is in the CommerceBuilder.USPS.dll*.  The correction was made so that Military APO AE addresses will work.  The original AbleCommerce Gold patch,  released on July 28th, used the "MILITARY" word in service codes (following the provided USPS release notes), but it did not match the actual service results returned from USPS.

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.

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 required to configure all variants for a service/shipping method you want to configure.