Sudden 30% increase in UPS shipping charges.

For some reason starting this morning my UPS ground shipping increased by 25%. I have had several orders today and when I double checked them in UPS Worldship they were all about 30% higher than Worldship. My orders from last night and earlier are fine. They match UPS Worldship perfectly. I have not made any changes in the shipping module in the last few weeks. iIeven checked it out and it is as it should be. Does anybody have any ideas? Should I call UPS?
Thanks in advance.
Paul Hall

We are having the same problem. I turned off the residential button in the shipping options section and that seemed to solve the problem. I can only assume that the shipping estimator now automatically assumes residential addresses, whereas last year it wasn't. I think without turning off the RES buttom, we are charging double the residential fee.

Hello Chandlers,
I switched from RES to COM and that did reduce the shipping cost some but it is still not right. We sell wood products, mainly cedar closet linings, so all of our shipments are UPS ground. On a 55 lb package to California the actual UPS ground shipping is $40.64 from my zip but the UPS shipping Module in Zen cart shows $59.80 That is a huge difference. My guess is that we are losing around $500.00 in orders per day because of this problem. I hope someone can help me solve this before its to late. I bet allot of Zen cart users are having this problem but do not know that they have it. Again everything worked fine until the 1/1/11
Paul Hall

Have you asked your UPS rep ?

UPS rates did go up as 1/1/11, but not as much as the store calculator has raised them. Our cart is charging on average $5 too much, hopefully someone knows how to fix this... I am currently headed to ups.com to do some research...

According to the UPS site "...There are no significant enhancements to the APIs for January 2011..." hmmmm

For the time being I made the following change to the checkout_shipping.php file.
Remember to use the override system when changing core files...
From this:

define('TEXT_CHOOSE_SHIPPING_METHOD', 'Please select the preferred shipping method to use on this order. <br /><br /><strong>NOTE:</STRONG> Customer is responsible for any and all import taxes and/or duties on products purchased.');

To this:

define('TEXT_CHOOSE_SHIPPING_METHOD', 'Please select the preferred shipping method to use on this order. <br /><br /><strong>NOTE:</STRONG> Customer is responsible for any and all import taxes and/or duties on products purchased. <br /><br />We are currently experiencing issues with UPS shipping rates. If you are over charged you will be refunded the difference at the time of shipping. We apologize for the inconvenience.');

MountainWilliam:

Hello Chandlers,
I switched from RES to COM and that did reduce the shipping cost some but it is still not right. ....
1.3.8a
My packages generally sound a lot smaller but this is what I did as well.

For me setting it to commercial jived with the UPS calculated rate using the pre-paid selection on the UPS site's calculator and entering the account number. Tested with a 4 pound package.

We actually still use a UPS label book so we get invoiced rather then pre-paying per. se. but I did verify on the phone with UPS not only the rate but also that the prepaid selection is the one we should use for finding rates. The selection used to say something like "I will give the package to my UPS driver or..." but that selection is no longer available.

Making the change to commercial made the two rates agree identically for me. Keeping an eye on it.

Has anyone found a resolution to this? I have tried every setting and nothing gets me close to what it should be. I have set the package tare to 0 and set UPS to COM and am still 20% too high.

Don-
I switched over to the UPS XML module found here:
http://www.zen-cart.com/...
It works properly...

Any word on this problem? I am losing sales because of this and I do not want to go to the XML route.

micmed:

Any word on this problem? I am losing sales because of this and I do not want to go to the XML route.

No word from UPS here, XML is easy to set up didn't take long at all and looks nicer... heres a screen shot of my test store with UPS.php above UPS XML:

That is well and good except I am a drop shipper and do not want to have to create a UPS account just to pull rates.

micmed:

That is well and good except I am a drop shipper and do not want to have to create a UPS account just to pull rates.
I just check on UPS.com, you don't actually have to have a UPS shipping account, just a myUPS online account. follow this link and check out the "how to get started"
https://www.ups.com/...Nav

Okay I installed UPS XML. I configured it. Now my shipping calculator does not work and I cannot proceed to the checkout module. I had to go back to the other built in UPS and put a -$2 in the handling charge in order to make up for at least some of the overcharges that are occurring.

There has to be another answer to this. I cannot believe that others are not having the same problem. :no:

Scratch my previous comment. I believe I have it working now.
Thanks Mike

Update, I did some tests and now shipping quotes and "Go to Checkout" are not working for international addresses.

micmed:

There has to be another answer to this. I cannot believe that others are not having the same problem. :no:

Just noticed this on the first domestic order of the year... $15 for a $10 cross-country shipping charge... yeah - there's something up with UPS. :shocking: (it added $2.85 to any zone, same local zip all the way to the other end of the country)

Installed the XML version, thanks for that info btw, and it's back to being correct. Backup, update, and test time - 13 minutes.

I am having a huge discrepancy between the different rates given by UPS since year end. I have found that when the customer has an order total under $100 the rates are dead on, but as soon as the shipping cost goes above $100 and insurance needs to be added, everything goes crazy. It is almost like it is trying to add in insurance and the residential surcharge and the delivery area surcharges twice? The same $3600 order for two 44lbs packages show a $40 price difference between ups.com and the zen cart price. The world ship price is different from both of those I am trying to work with a new UPS rep, but he is new and doesn't have the answers I need. I don't know where to look to see if there is any funny calculations coming over from UPS? any help would be appreciated.

Not to go OT here but raising the residential surcharge 35 cents per package on top of the 5% across the board increase was ridiculous. UPS is going to either make a killing on that .35 or lose their customer base in disgust.

Did the XML thingy and this:

Read post #26 on the new USPS January 2, 2011 C shipping module update for USPS ...
http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showth...059#post978059

Now all is well with shipping... I think.