[ic] Postage charges

Ed LaFrance interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Wed Jun 5 10:06:01 2002


At 04:05 PM 6/5/2002 +0800, you wrote:
>Our national postal charges are based on weight, volume and distance.
>
>For instance, a 250g package going 50km might cost $2.75, but the same 
>package going 1000km  could cost $3.80.  Now to throw a spanner in the 
>works, if the package is too bulky (above a certain size), extra charges 
>will apply.  But we can ignore those at present.
>
>What I need to do is to get this scale of charges to work with interchange 
>so that it automagically works out the correct postage and applies it to 
>accounts.
>
>Does anyone know how I would do this?
>
>Regards
>
>John Breen

This is essentially the way that the internal UPS (the US's United Parcel 
Service) shipping table lookups works. UPS provides zone tables for 
shipping origins across the US, which divide all possible destinations from 
that origin into zones. They then reference a second table, which contains 
a series of weight ranges, and actual shipping charges for each range, for 
each zone.

No doubt your own country's postal system does something similar. If you 
can obtain the appropriate tables, you can adapt them to Interchange's 
internal system. As of late, direct querying of the UPS servers to do real 
time shipping cost lookups has usurped the table-based system, and if your 
postal service supports it and you have the means to develop it, I 
certainly would recommend that path.

- Ed L.


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