You must have the Mals premium cart in order to setup advanced shipping calculations yourself.
First you must apply for an account with USPS for their free webtools shipping api’s
https://secure.shippingapis.com/Registration/
After you’ve applied you’ll receive an email with a username and password. However, the shipping calculator won’t work until USPS has put you on the production server. The first email from them is for the testing phase which we don’t need to do since we use Mals.
You’ll either need to reply to the first email they send you or call the USPS and let them know you will be using Mals-Ecommerce as your shopping cart and would like to be put on the production server.
After you receive the second email from them telling you you have finished the production phase, you’re ready to setup your shipping.
All shipping units will need to be filled in on each product. These units need to be based on pounds and decimals of pounds. Ounces won’t work. For instance: 1 lb 5 ounces would be: 1.312 . 1 lb 4 ounces would be 1.25
In Mals:
- Go to Cart Setup
- In the left nav bar mouse over Shipping
- Mouse over Advanced Shipping
- Select USPS Rates
- In the top text field add your USPS webtools username
- Then add your password and your zip code.
- Tick the box at the top to Use quotes direct from the USPS rates service.
- Click on Submit.
- In the left nav bar again select Shipping
- Select Advanced shipping
- Select Shipping tables
- Add your state, add the sales tax you’ll need charge and tick the box to make it taxable.
- Click on update.
- Click on add new option.
- Add the name of your new shipping service whether it’s priority mail, parcel post of first class. You’ll have to add a new option for each mail class
- Select the mail class from the drop down and add any handling fees you want to add to the appropriate box..
- Do this for all mail classes under your state.
- Click on add new zone just above the shipping tables.
- Name this zone United States (except Your state) Be sure to include the actual state name. You’ll see why when you go to links to zones.
- Follow the same steps as before to setup new options within each zone.
- Follow the same steps to add international and Canada. Canada is usually so much cheaper to send to that they get their own zone.
- Be sure to click on update after each option and when creating a new zone.
- In the left nav bar again mouse over shipping
- Mouse over advanced shipping
- Select Links to Zones
- Click on the link for countries: Include or exclude any countries you don’t want to ship too.
- Click on update.
- In the left nav bar, mouse over shipping, mouse over Advanced shipping, click on Global Settings.
- Tick the box at the top of the page to: Use advanced shipping calculations...Click on Submit!
Your shipping should now with the USPS rate calculator!
