- Real-time shipping requires an EasyPost account (which is free)
- Stores with physical/shippable subscription products are not allowed to use real-time shipping
- Using real-time shipping while your store is in test mode can be pretty slow sometimes because the test API for EasyPost is anywhere from 1/2 to 1/10 the speed of their production API
- EasyPost is free to sign up for and use, the only cost comes when you want to buy labels which are 5 cents each
- EasyPost has separate test and live secret API keys
- Only the secret keys are required for Cart66 at the moment
- Cart66 automatically chooses whether to use the test or live keys based on the current mode of the store
- A From Address is required and is configured when you enable real-time shipping
- Currently supported carriers are UPS, FedEx and USPS
- Any combination of carrier/shipping methods may be configured for real-time shipping
- Currently no way to re-order the shipping methods, they are grouped and shown in order by UPS, FedEx and USPS respectively
- Rates can be tweaked by amount or percentage, positive or negative
- Switching away from real-time shipping back to flat rates or free mode does NOT delete your real-time shipping configuration, you can switch back to real-time later and everything will still be intact
- Real-time rates calculated on the checkout page are based on everything going into one box
- If an error occurs while calculating rates with EasyPost an error message is shown and I am notified about the error
- If the shipping address is not valid for some reason it will show a message saying they are unable to ship to that address
- Order list screen now shows a column for shipping status
- Shipping status shows a "-" for orders that do NOT contain any shippable products
- New tab called Awaiting Shipment is now available which shows all live and test orders that contain shippable products but have not yet been marked as shipped
- New button on order detail page at the top and in the shipping area below called Ship which takes you to a new fulfillment screen
- Ship button only shows for orders containing shippable products
- Once fulfillment has been completed, the Ship button goes away, never to return, it can only be done once
- After order is fulfilled, the shipping labels are shown in the shipping area along with buttons for tracking and printing the label
- Track button opens a new tab for the tracking page on the carrier's website
- Clicking one of the shipping label thumbnails opens up the label image by itself in the browser
- A Send Tracking To Customer button is made available after fulfillment which sends an email to the customer containing the tracking information/links
- A new Shipping toggle is available at the bottom to manually mark an order as shipped or not
- This toggle can be used for flat rate shipping in addition to real-time shipping
- If you choose not to mark as shipped on the new ship screen when purchasing labels, you can come here to manually mark it as shipped at a later time
- Boxes are configured on this screen with dimensions and weight
- Dimensions have to be in inches and the weight unit is based on the store setting, either lb or kg
- No limit on the number of boxes
- The more boxes you add, the longer the fulfillment process will take after clicking Ship It
- Optionally send tracking information to customer right after clicking Ship It
- Custom message can be configured for this tracking email which is shown at the top of the email
- Optionally marked as shipped right after clicking Ship It
- IMPORTANT: Clicking Ship It immediately purchases shipping labels using your EasyPost account, 1 label for each box you configured, this is a ONE TIME deal, you can't do it again