Is the next version of the impressive DotShoppingcart going to come with Shipping Providers?  (UPS, Fedex, etc), or should we develop that facility on our own?   Table-based shipping just doesn't cut it.

egc

No, currently that is part of commercial edition features. The plan is to divide the commercial edition into the small plugable modules, which will be offered at more affordable price. Each module (the shipping provider module includes UPS, USPS and FedEx) will be targeted at $99. You could develop your own version if you wish. You could either resell your version or donate it to the community. We will build up a market place for third party modules on our website.

Thanks Luke!

BTW, does your implementaion of Google Checkout payment processing support GC's new shipping calculation feature as well?

egc

If you are asking for merchant-calculation-callback API, the answer is "Yes". It's located in GoogleCheckoutMerchantCalculationHandler.aspx. It deals with Tax calculation as well. The trick is doing the calculation in 3 seconds.

[QUOTE]lukezy wrote

If you are asking for merchant-calculation-callback API, the answer is "Yes". It's located in GoogleCheckoutMerchantCalculationHandler.aspx. It deals with Tax calculation as well. The trick is doing the calculation in 3 seconds.

[/QUOTE]

Luke,

No, I mean that Google Checkout now offers the facility for them to query UPS and Fedex for the shipping costs during the call to GC.   This fixes the 3 second issue, but at present they are limited to a single package in the query.   I've tried it and it works well.

egc

Ok, I think http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checkout_XML_API_Carrier_Calculated_Shipping.html is what you are talking about.

As a developer I think Google Checkout is trying to do too much its own thing. Google doesn't listen to the developers too much. The problem with that approach is that it bundles payment with shipping and with tax, coupon etc. Web site isn't only dealing with Google Checkout. There are other payment gateways, shipping provider as well. In the end I have to prepare seperate code paht to deal with Google Checkout. Also that code is ugly enough coupled with the shipping and tax calculation. PayPal is much easier to deal with. Google Check is essentially a Payment gateway. It will be much appreciated if it just sticks to payment provider.

So the answer is no. I probably don't have plan to implement that since the current implementation is good enough to get job done and easier to maintain.

What about the 3 second problem?   I was never able to get around that.   Even multi-threading the shipping queries for parallelism.   Timeouts happen all the time.

egc

Since you asked the real trick is to do just one round trip to the shipping provider. You need to package your request well. Usually I query all the possible rates from one zipcode to another. After I get back all the rates I will filter out unneccessary rates. And then send the rates back to Google. The fast server also helps. The shared hosting plan is probably another culprit for the timeout. You could build up a ping service somewhere. Ping your call back apsx from time to time so that it's always warmed up in the congested memory of the shared hosting server. Hope this help.

My problem with the 3 second issue (and this is from a dedicated server) is that I support multiple items shipping from different locations.    That results in several independent requests, but they have to all be accomplished within that timeslice.   Impossible!

egc

Agree. I think Google Checkout should do what Paypal Express checkout does. Let site owners decide the entire checkout processes to their customers. I guess Google is trying to control too much data and invading into the space that shouldn't belong to them.