How difficult will it be?

lol.. Hi everyone! ok basically we have a zen-cart for our company with over 20 000 items! we stock electronic components... In order to update the website I wrote a C# app that takes the stock prices and quantity's from the stock system at work, does some analysis on them and writes them to the zen MySql DB. took me quite a while to develop that app but it works reasonable well.. but besides the point!

at the moment we have multiple table rates; overnight, door to door, economy. etc etc... and they work based on the products weight up to 10Kg..(after which orders become difficult...) however since we serve our entire country (South Africa) and neighbors this is certainly not the most efficient way to do things... i.e. too high shipping for close customers and too little for far customers etc.

What we want to do is move to a system where we send the shipping weight+volume+postal code to the customer to the shippers and calculate the shipping price dynamically and on the fly... now one of our shippers provides a SOAP interface to this service (you can check it out here: http://interfaces.bercoexpress.co.za/express.htm)

Now my questions for the pro's are:

  1. How do I add dimensions/volume to the products in the DB for shipping purposes?
  2. Can I make call's to the SOAP methods with some PHP from within zen-cart or am I going to have to devise a more creative solution?
  3. Is the a shipping add-on that does something similar to what I need (I keep reading about the Canada post module) that I could hack into getting it to do what I need? or would I have to write a module from scratch?


I have experience with C#/asp.net MSSql (and taught myself alot of the MySql quirks for working with Zen) and only limited PHP experience but I'm willing to learn if i can use it to solve this problem...

Any help would be appreciated! thanks guys :)
~Rob.