cfreak has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Deadline coming due and I'm pulling my hair out. I have a fairly simple shopping cart system I'm writting and I need to be able to get rate quotes from Fedex. So of course I fire up my trusty friend CPAN, unfortunatly I'm not having much luck. There are two modules that seem to be what I need Business::Fedex and Business::Fedex::DirectConnect. The former is Win32 only which won't help me. The latter looks promising however it does not document many of the codes needed, nor does it give the URI for connecting to the FedEx API. Instead there is a FedEx URL where all this information should be at ... but alas FedEx has since changed their site and you have to be an 'approved provider' or have a FedEx account already, both of which apparently cost money (that my company would prefer not to spend), just to even get the documentation.

My question is, has anyone does this successfully? Does anyone here have the documentation? Is there a better way?

Thanks!

Lobster Aliens Are attacking the world!
  • Comment on Obtaining a package shipping rate from FedEx

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Re: Obtaining a package shipping rate from FedEx
by Zed_Lopez (Chaplain) on Aug 25, 2004 at 16:10 UTC

    I implemented something driving Business::Fedex::DirectConnect at my last job.

    The Fedex docs document the relevant codes. (No, I don't have them anymore.)

    I forget whether it used to be the case that one required a Fedex account # just to download their package, but it was the case that one needed an account # to talk to their server.

    Tell your boss to cough up the bucks for the account #. You don't want to try to compute the rates yourself... there are so many rules and exceptions you'd be at it for weeks (even if you could get all the relevant documentation without the account.)

[reply]

      Well the Customer's account number can be used for the actual transaction. The problem was I was having trouble obtaining it since the customer was out of town. I finally did obtain it earlier today ...

      However I'm kind of back to square one because even having the account number and the documentation they don't give you the connection URIs ... you have to complete their certification which apparently consists of your app running some test scripts ... they also don't tell you how much that costs though they mention there is a fee. The company is definatly not interested in paying an unknown cost and wasting time with that, especially when what you get for it is rather dubious, especially for a small company.

      It's all very frustrating, you would think that FedEx would be happy to make getting a package rate fairly simple in whatever format you want as someone will probably use that information to charge their own customers and give FedEx more money. But they do not.

      As for calculating myself ... nah, I'll use WWW::Mechanize to get rates from the form on their website before I calculate myself.

      Lobster Aliens Are attacking the world!
[reply]
Re: Obtaining a package shipping rate from FedEx
by jbullock35 (Hermit) on Aug 26, 2004 at 08:36 UTC
    You should be able to sign up for a free account at www.fedex.com/signup. It worked for me: I have an account I don't pay for got to the API documentation with no problem. If you have any trouble, I can send you the documentation, but you will still need an account number to connect to the API.

    --John <john.bullock@stanford.edu>
[reply]

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