Ubercart + UPS account and testing

We finally received our account from UPS late January after a visit from Yee Foo Shien, the E-Commerce Manager for UPS Malaysia to our office on the 19th of January. He did a good job on explaining what we need to get started i.e, some notes on shipping, taxes and the normal stuffs that goes on with shipping items across borders. In my previous post, I mentioned that it seems nobody at UPS return back to my registration at ups.com. Well, somehow its my pc's email system that fails to fetch the follow-up by joseph from ups.com which forwarded my account registration to Kin Lett, the Business Development team here in Malaysia.

The whole process went pretty smooth despite so many holidays then, from Christmas to New Year and Chinese New Year but we finally received an account number on 30th of January 2009. Its a relief to finally get it as I was very excited to try the xml accesskey to receive shipping quotes for moochiku.com clients automatically. Currently we have POS Malaysia rates custom coded into our shipping method which handles both shipping and handling charges. Its a tedious affair to custom ruled them using the flat-rate method with ubercart.

We planned to have our newly integrated site with ubercart+paypal+Pos Malaysia up and running on the 1st of February but since we managed to get the UPS account on the 30th of January, we thought it'd be a good idea to integrate them straight away, and that will ease our site update process. The integration of UPS online tools with the xmlaccesskey seems straightforward at first but I am unable to get them working properly. There could be some configurations which is beyond what we could do to have it running without errors. We have identified the problem and it seems that we might have to move to a vps or our own dedicated server for that. Im still investigating a way to do this with our current host.

Today, we have decided we can't wait for the UPS problem to get solved before we went live, furthermore POS Malaysia air parcel service offers better pricing, acceptable delivery time and the ability to track shipments just as with the other big boys. We are still testing with UPS on our testing server and we hope to get this solved as soon as possible.

"Your Lord revealed to the bees: "Build dwellings in the mountains and the trees, and also in the structures which men erect. Then eat from every kind of fruit and travel the paths of your Lord, which have been made easy for you to follow." From inside them comes a drink of varying colors, containing healing for humanity. There is certainly a sign in that for people who reflect. (Qu'ran, 16:68-69)