Has anyone looked at their UPS shipping rates and compared what's reported on the website vs. World ship used in your store? We did today and saw the website shipping charges were almost twice what the desktop worldship prices are. Both are fed by UPS and I can't figure it out.

Just wondered if anyone else sees this same thing. Anyone?

I don't have live shipping on this platform but I have to wonder if the version being reported on the store is retail rate while what is being reported on UPS desktop is your negotiated rate.

Yes - we do see this too. I think it boils down to the internal system passing through only "weight" and shipping zip as opposed to the UPS site gathering dimensional details. When our customers order, there is no way to pass through dimensional details - which at times results in a larger than expected cost. Not sure how the logic would work to calculate and add together dims and calculate a cost that is close to the actual UPS estimate on their site.

Why would it work any differently than World Ship? I was somewhat dissapointed in the Network Solutions® UPS integration. I just started using it a few weeks ago. I entered all the weights and dimensions of our items only to learn that Network Solutions® was not passing it through to UPS. It seems like simple logic to me if the information is there.

I know dimensions don't have anything to do with the issue I'm talking about and we don't have negotiated rates.

To add to this, my boss says she's never seen any UPS charge from the store or the website match what's on the invoice. Apparently that's because they add to the shipping charge with a fuel surcharge and sometimes an extended service fee???? When I looked at the invoice, there would be a $5 shipping fee but then a fuel charge and service fee might bring it to a charge of over $10. There was no consistent variable to those things either. So we would charge a customer $5 but it cost us $10 to send the package.

This started because of a separate issue. One week ago, our orders dropped to zero. Carts were being abandoned prior to checkout steps. I thought it was the checkout process but that works fine. I started checking the shipping because I thought they might be using the shipping estimator prior to starting check out. I haven't gotten anywhere figuring this out but zero orders is a dire situation for us.

Still interested in more cost effective shipping methods and any suggestions for investigating the abandoned carts.

FWIW, every whitepaper and survey I see on conversions says folks want free shipping first and flat rate second. This is not practical for all merchants, but we have found that it makes the difference for us. We offer free and flat rate shipping, then UPS calculated pricing for overnight and second day shipping if the customer wants it. Again, it may not work for your business but finding a way to give customers what they want is usually good.

As for shipping rates, we have negotiated rates and we have found them to be pretty much in line with our invoice on items that don't fall into dim weight pricing. We exclude these dim weight items from expidited shipping and only allow the free shipping option (we build the freight into the price).

That is a million dollar question.

FYI
Small part of mystery solved. I continued to troubleshoot this problem and spoke to a customer who called to cancel an order. Shipping charges were too high for him. I went back and started looking at items that prior to conversion had been hugely popular. The weights did not convert properly. In an odd case, a value showed up in the pounds field where there had not been in v4. That was for a pencil!
Sometimes they are off very little but other times, they are off quite a bit. When I was comparing before, the items were pretty straightforward, ie, with weights in the 10 pound arena. I neglected to check the featherweight items.

A small example I found today: a single cellophane bag converted from .01 to .16
Since those get ordered by the hundreds sometimes, you can see why a customer would flee when the order ships as 16 pounds instead of one pound!

Unfortunately, the majority of our products are very lightweight and I suspect that if I could go quickly through the site, I would find more of this problem. I don't know if it had to do with decimals or what.

Thanks for the discussion.