How can I integrate ups worldship with my web site so I can email
tracking and shipment notifications. Will I have to develop and
somekind of relay software myself that sends the data from the "End of
day" worldship export, to my website for proccessing and emailing? How is this
normally done?

---

Request for Question Clarification by hummer-ga on 03 Apr 2004 08:32 PST

Hi georgelantz,

Would something like this be suitable?

UltraCart: UPS Integration:
"Shipping with UPS is one of the most popular shippers in the world
and UltraCart has tight integration! UltraCart is capable of real-time
estimation of shipping costs between your customer and your shipping
location. Accurate shipping costs will save you significant money
(especially if you ship international). Besides shipping cost
estimation, UltraCart is capable of exporting all your information
into the UPS WorldShip software. Within seconds of clicking the export
button on UltraCart you can be printing UPS address labels. Now that
is a major time saver! It gets better though. The tracking numbers
assigned by UPS WorldShip can be imported in to UltraCart. UltraCart
will then send your customer an email notification that the order has
shipped (including a link to tracking information that looks like it's
hosted on your website)"
http://www.ultracart.com/whyultracart.html

Regards,
hummer

---

Clarification of Question by georgelantz-ga on 03 Apr 2004 10:47 PST

Actually I am already aware of pre constructed shopping carts. The one
I am working on is for a client that has a custom shopping cart
application. They use UPS worldship for their shipping. Worldship has
the ability to export all shipping data (including tracking numbers)
at the end of the day. I have already added support for address
validation and real time shipping charges to their shopping cart. I
have worked with these types of prebuilt shopping carts that integrate
with UPS. Unfortinetly, becuase of specific needs they need to stay
with the custom shopping cart. Writing a relay program that manually
or automatically uploads tracking info back to our website is not a
problem. I just don't want to reinvent the weel. Are their programs
that do the task of sending data back to the website? Or will I have
to write something myself? I guess I may be looking for source code
(PHP) or instructions on writing this myself or an application that
does only this task. I was thinking of writing the application in C#
and relaying the data via soap/xml back to a web service on the
website and from there proccessing and sending the email
notifications. If there is a program that does this (or something
similar) then that would be better than doing it mayself.

I got this integrated into osCommerce.  See the user contributions. 
Also, UPS will email your customers, for a fee.  That is why UPS
Worldship has an email field in the customer data entry.

UPS Worldship is a nightmare to configure, in my experience.  I got
the MySQL-ODBC driver installed on the WorldShip PC and a MySQL server
elsewhere on the network.  You can configure Worldship to connect to
MySQL via MySQL-ODBC so that when you do end-of-day, the MySQL
database gets updated automatically.

Once you got the data in a MySQL database, it is no problem writing
something in PHP to connect the warehouse to the webserver.