Using Volusion for your eCommerce store provides many benefits to you and your customers that strengthen the overall shopping experience on your site. From free templates to integrated one-page checkout, Volusion would seem to have it all. However, when it comes to shipping companies, you find that your options are limited.
While FedEx and UPS work for many companies, shipping your products through big brands like these costs an exorbitant amount of money. Showing the shipping costs at check out is costing you customers, but processing transactions over the phone is hurting your productivity.
You have a shipping company you trust and they don’t cost an arm and a leg. Maybe they even specialize in shipping your niche product. However, they’re unable to be featured as a shipping option in your Volusion store due to the high cost of inclusion.
Until now, the high shipping cost of well-known brands or the telephone were the only two options you had when fulfilling orders. Lucky for you the programmers here at Optimum7 are expert Volusion developers and were able to develop a simple and effective SOAP web service solution.
The Optimum7 Freightquote Web Service: How It Works
Our new web service allows you to include any shipping company as an option for your customers during checkout without that company having to go through Volusion to get listed.
When someone orders something from your website, some of that information must be sent to the shipping company so they can provide a quote on the delivery cost that you can include in the order pricing.
They will need various parameters including the weight of the product(s), the pallet’s dimensions, and the postal and country codes. The weight and dimensions can be defined per product on Volusion, Bigcommerce, Shopify, Magento, Netsuite or 3DCart. The customer fills out the rest when they are completing their order.
Our web service takes this information from Volusion and parses it in a way that the shipping company can read. For example, most shipping companies need the total weight and the quantity and dimensions of the pallets involved, rather than that of individual products. Volusion will not calculate this information for you, but our web service will.
Once the information has been parsed, the service calls the shipping company and provides the necessary information. The company in turn provides a quote on the delivery cost, which can then be displayed on the order form. Quotes are provided on a per carrier basis, of which there can be several. Once the customer chooses the carrier and places their order, our service sends the order to the carrier for fulfillment.
The Optimum7 Freightquote Web Service acts on the fly, sending and receiving data in fractions of a second, so there is no extra wait time for your customers. The only thing you need to use this service is an email address, an API key provided by Optimum7, and an account with your carrier(s) of choice.
A Solution for eCommerce Businesses and Shipping Companies
The Optimum7 Freightquote Web Service is a great way for both eCommerce businesses and shipping companies to increase their sales. eCommerce businesses now have the opportunity to provide their customers with more options for shipping from the companies they trust, while shipping companies can now be listed on Volusion as a cheaper option – even local shipping companies. If you only operate in a certain area, we can set it up so you only come up as an option when the order destination is within your service area.
For more information on our Freightquote Web Service, to get an API key, or to discuss other Volusion, Bigcommerce, Shopify, Magento, Netsuite, 3DCart, or custom eCommerce solutions, please contact us today by calling (305) 477-8960.
