Overriding Carrier Rates with Custom Rates

Overview

In this guide, we’ll go through how to charge custom rates but still use the additional functionality that a live carrier provides. An example would be if you’re selling perishable products and want to use ShipperHQ’s advanced delivery date and time functionality with live time in transit displayed for your chosen carrier.

Prerequisites

We’ll assume for the sake of this example that you’ve already enabled the Delivery Date & Time functionality in ShipperHQ and set up your UPS carrier selecting UPS Ground, UPS 2nd Day, and UPS Next Day as available shipping methods.

Setup

In this example, we’ll look at overriding the shipping rates for US Domestic shipments for UPS Ground by setting it to a flat rate of $10, UPS 2nd Day at a flat rate of $20, and UPS Next Day at a flat rate of $30. We’ll also want to show a delivery date based on the live time in transit info from UPS. This is done by setting up three shipping rules.

1. Click on Shipping Rules in the left-hand navbar and click the +New  button to add a new Shipping Rule
2. We’ll first set up a rule to set the UPS Ground rate. In the Basic panel of your new Shipping Rule, enter a name like “Set UPS Ground to $10” in the Name field.
3. Also in the Basic tab under the Shipping Methods section, Add “UPS Ground” under the Live Shipping Methods Assigned section. This tells ShipperHQ to apply this rule to your UPS Ground Shipping Method.
4. In the Actions panel, under “Action to Perform” set I want to… to “Modify the Price of my selected Shipping Methods,” and then set In Order to… to “Override Rates,” and “By a Flat Rate” and enter “10” in as the flat rate. This tells ShipperHQ to override the rate that UPS returns for UPS Ground and set it to $10 instead.
5. In the Conditions panel, select “US” in the Zones Included dropdown. This tells ShipperHQ to only apply this rule for customers in this shipping zone.
6. Repeat steps 1-5, setting the name to something like “Set UPS 2nd Day to $20,” selecting “UPS 2nd Day,” and setting the rate to $20. All other settings can be the same for this rule.
7. Repeat steps 1-5, setting the name to something like “Set UPS Next Day to $30,” selecting “UPS Next Day,” and setting the rate to $30. All other settings can be the same for this rule.

After following the steps above, customers on your site will see UPS Ground at a rate of $10, UPS 2nd Day at a rate of $20, and UPS Next Day at a rate of $30 with delivery date information generated by ShipperHQ based on live time in transit information from UPS.

Additional Options

There are many other options for how you set shipping rates with Shipping Rules but this gives you an idea of how to override live shipping rates so that you can make use of live carrier shipping methods and functionality while still charge the rate you want to charge.