Shipping Providers

 

The Shipping Providers tool allows you to set up shipping accounts to be used on your site. These can be set up to either use one account for all locations, or individual accounts per each location. This article will provide details on how to go about using this tool.

Setting Up a Shipping Account

The main screen of the Shipping Providers tool can be seen above. Please see below for further notes on what each tool section does.

  1. This is a list of all the providers currently integrated into WebAlliance.

  2. The All Locations heading indicates that the options/account selected on the right-hand side will be applied to all of your site's locations when it comes to shipping.

  3. The Location Specific heading instead allows you to change the options/account selected on the right-hand side per each individual location if you need to be more specific with each location. There is some additional guidance for using Location Specific providers at the bottom of this article.

  4. The Current Option field is populated with any integrations that you have already configured for the selected Shipping Provider, this is only used for Location Specific purposes.

    For example, if you have 6 locations, 3 on the West Coast and 3 on the East Coast you may have two accounts you'd like to set up for FedEx. Once you set up an account on an East Coast and a West Coast location, you can then select this option for the other locations as appropriate as opposed to having to redo the configuration each time for each location.

  5. The Friendly Name field is used by you to give the option you create a recognizable name. In the previous example, you may choose to use friendly names such as FedEx West and FedEx East.

  6. The Options area will differ from integration to integration slightly depending on what each provider requires but is effectively where you will need to enter the appropriate provider credentials. You will also decide here if you'd like to use Published or Negotiated rates for the provider if you have any that can be used.

  7. The Override Location Addresses tool allows you to reconfigure the origin address for any location when sending the information to your shipping provider for estimates.

  8. Legacy Options reflect the data that WebAlliance would have had previously about your shipping provider integration. If a new set of options has been created, these options are ignored.

Remember to save any changes that you make to a shipping provider in order for the changes to reflect on the site. 

Location Specific Details

As you can see from the image above, the Location Specific configuration is very similar to the All Locations tab, with the exception that you can now select a location to configure individually. It may be easier to consider setting up a Location Specific set of options as creating shipping profiles.

Example


In the screenshot below, I've set up an example of the information for a FedEx account for the selected Factory Stock location. However, since I plan to use this exact same configuration for a handful of locations based on their proximity, I use the friendly name "FedEx Williamson County" instead and hit the save button to finalize the changes.

Next, I decide I want to set up the Harrisburg Store location, but I know that since it is in the same county (Williamson) as the Factory Stock location, I will want to use the same options. Instead of starting over, when I swap to the Harrisburg Store location, I can use the Current Option drop-down box to select the "FedEx Williamson County" configuration I created earlier to use the same configuration. 

This prevents you from having to enter in the same info each time, however, if you want every location to use the same configuration, you should instead use the All Locations tab to put them all under the same umbrella for that particular provider.