Why ShipStation for Live Rates?
ShipStation is a leading software that enables you to automatically import, manage, and ship your online orders. It supports the most popular channels in the eComemrce industry such as Amazon, Ebay, Etsy and a full list of partners here.
It excels with advanced integration with the tools you already work with. Such as Magento, Canada Post, FedEx, UPS etc.
Shipstation integrate very well with those carriers, as they are at the core of their Business.
Reviewing ShipStation module for Magento their official module.
A few pros are:
- Linking multiple Carriers to your ShipStation account.
- Accurate Shipping Rates from your carriers based on Parcel weight. (the most precise calculator yet)
- Orders placed in Magento shows in ShipStation account for you to link them to the correct Carriers they will ship out with.
- Print the Labels and have the shipment picked up.
- Reasonable monthly costs.
A few cons:
- In Magento you’re still facing the same dilemma, how to get same Rates as in ShipStation but to your customers in Cart + Checkout?
- At the moment Magento admins are still using 3rd party Shipping Method integration or Table Rates in order to show some Shipping Rates.
What if ShipStation was the Shipping Method ?
Fixing those cons:
Yes we built our own Shipping Extension which is allows ShipStation as a Shipping Method. You are able to show those same Live Rates on your Magento Store now!
We’re not talking about the extension features here which you can read and acquire on Magento Connect, or directly on our Extension store we’re talking about how it can definitely help your business out on the long-run.
In Canada for example. There’s not one extension that we’ve tested which was able to work exactly as advertised.
The 2 major ones that most of our customers have tried before abandoning them later down the road are:
- Collinsharper Canada Post module reviewed – Failed with Live Rate, consistency and poor support.
- Demac Media Canada Post module reviewed – Technically failed out of the box to work, no support at all.
The Best accurate solution for Canada Post setup in Magento
- Request a Canada Post developer key. (if you don’t already have one for your Commercial account or Venture one account.)
- Subscribe to ShipStation account and Input that API Key into account. (The carriers will be visible as in the image below)
- In ShipStation Settings you can find your ShipStation API Username + Password. (Copy those.)
- Get the Extension “ShipStation as Shipping Method + Live Rates” for your Magento store.
- In Magento admin Paste the API username and password from step.3 (there’s a few settings to choose as in the screenshot below)
- You got yourself the same Rates displaying on your Magento store from your ShipStation account at this point.
Voilà, I’ve just described to you how to Use Shipstation in order to get the most accurate Shipping Rates in Canada. (It’s not limited to Canada Post, plug in as many supported carriers and it will show up the rates on the Magento store.)