With our pickup/packaging business there is no way to give a price up front. Only to give an estimate based on the information we receive. There are too many variables that go into the packaging process (padding, re-arranging items, multiple boxes etc). Something that I would love to be perfect on but its a very hard problem.
We typically split items into multiple boxes for safety or to reduce the cost of the overall shipments. There are some very high oversize fees from the carriers that we try to avoid as much as possible.
I hope you will give this new product a try :)
You can also probably add a "Is this item fragile" as an option to add less or more padding.
Also I send 3 boxes of the exact same size, it would be great in your app to be able to duplicate items (I had to create one big package by adding the height and weight all together, was too lazy to create 3 different ones, or 2 in a extra large and 1 in a large)
I sent an email to the support and got refund a bit. (all the boxes I shipped were the same size, but I don't know why they were slightly different for all of them in the confirmation email I received ..)
It's always a ridiculous guessing game of LxWxH with penalties over Y dimensions total, with weight and shipping speed as confounding factors.
Then the calculus changes totally if you manage to fit the item into a slightly smaller box.
You have to juggle 3+ websites, entering a bunch of information that shouldn't really be relevant, to get to a cost number.
Then you go to ship something and the cost STILL is totally different from what the website said it would be.
Unapproved business models/usages
• Display of UPS rates side by side with competitor rates
[1]: (page 25) https://www.ups.com/media/en/UPS_dev_kit_user_guide.pdf
if you're big enough, or influential enough you can negotiate your own terms of use for any API or any service.
if you're small, then they probably won't even notice your usage.
shyp is not a weekend hackathon project. While it's certainly possible they're blatantly violating terms and hoping they don't get caught, that seems unlikely for a venture backed startup.
>Exceptional How? Shyp is nothing new. These services have been around for ages (Pitney Bowes, more recently Stamps.com, more recently than that Shipstation, Ordoro, the list is fairly extensive) and these terms have been around for just as long. If you want to use UPS in your app, better get used to playing by their rules. I bet we see a change very soon in the way Shyp presents pricing to the end user.
>If you're big enough... eBay and Amazon both do NOT show side-by-side cost comparisons for shipping services. Neither do ANY of the established "apps". Big enough for you?
>Small Shyp is below the radar as of until right about now.
As for the execution of the app itself. Why print an estimated delivery range (Fedex 1-6 days) when the exact date is available through API? Sometimes Fedex Ground is cheaper but a day slower. Price of delivery isn't everything (Prime has proven that abundantly).
I'm responsible for 100s of shipments per day, and I'm genuinely curious how they got around this restriction, as our order and shipping management system vendor doesn't allow us to rate shop UPS against other carriers (although both the Shippo and EasyPost APIs do allow this, whether directly or simply by providing the information required).
"Shyp uses Shippo to automatically get rates from multiple carriers, and create shipping labels at the lowest prices.
Shyp accepts orders from their app, and sends shipment information directly to their fulfillment center to be processed, same-day. Weight, dimensions, and other information about the item are then sent to the Shippo API and a shipping label is generated.
Shippo helps power Shyp by providing them with a way to automatically generate discounted shipping labels."