USPS Server Meltdown

m2pc writes "The US Postal Service is experiencing major server issues for its shipping API web services. After spending about an hour debugging my own eCommerce software for a client, I found the problem was with the USPS shipping servers being unavailable. Further research showed that message boards for OS Commerce and other e-Commerce packages are filling with posts from angry users who are experiencing crashing Web store applications and frustrated customers. Developers are scrambling to find interim solutions, from hard-coding fixed price shipping, to 'rolling their own' shipping calculation APIs based on the USPS Fixed Rate Zone Tables, to disabling the USPS option altogether. One user reported yesterday that a call to USPS yielded the response 'we expect it to be down all day.' As of 9:20 AM PST the service is still unavailable."

Comments

Bailout?

[erik76]

Sounds like the USPS is just angling to get some of that federal bailout money! Oh wait...

Re:Bailout?

[mewshi_nya]

So THAT'S why the present I sent to my girlfriend resulted in an e-mail from Amazon that the package was at the Post Office!

This explains a HELL of a lot... mostly, why Amazon said it was detained at the post office, but arrived at the door just about 20 minutes ago...

Re:Bailout?

[Gilmoure]

SAme thing happened to me. WEnt to PO; no package, no slip. They knew nothing about it. 4 days later, shows up at house. Weird!

Re:Bailout?

[peragrin]

That's normal for USPS tracking though. I have yet to be able to actually track a package with their system. In the last several years it has never once worked for me.
I don't understand why this year is any different. by the time their tracking software realizes a package is in the system the system has it delivered.

Re:Bailout?

[imamac]

Actually, I work for the USPS. And I always wondered what the big red button that says "DO NOT PUSH" actually did. Oops.

Re:Bailout?

[Gilmoure]

And then there's fun with UPS this year. Had a delivery dropped off at house one day. Next day, got card in mail; can't find house, come pick it up. Today, got another package delivered to house. Sigh.

Re:Bailout?

[peragrin]

odd but not as much as you might think. the middle day a replacement driver had the route. It is one reason why i send everything to work.

Re:Bailout?

[mrmeval]

Two weeks after a letter was delivered and I confirmed it with the person I sent it to. The post office 'tracking' site did finally admit it had been delivered. But it was pissed about having to admit it. I could tell.

Oh:

Go Postal does not have the same connotation as Go Federal. --mrmeval

Re:Bailout?

[peg110]

Sounds like the USPS is just angling to get some of that federal bailout money! Oh wait...

Ironically enough, the USPS is a self sustaining organization that doesn't get a budget from congress every year. (i.e. NO TAX DOLLARS). On the flip side, it's still backed by the Government, so tax dollars are available should it become absolutely necessary. Any "Bailout" of the USPS would only be bailing out the government agency anyway. From a Government point of view, I would think I would rather bailout my OWN company rather than Wall Street or The "Big 3", but where did it go /(is it going)?

That's what you get....

[morgan_greywolf]

And that's what you get for writing e-commerce packages that rely on 3rd party sites for basic functionality...

Don't say I didn't tell you so...

Re:That's what you get....

[qoncept]

While in principle I agree with that, what are they supposed to do? They are quoting you a price for a service they don't provide themselves.

Re:That's what you get....

[tekiegreg]

Really, you'd think someone in the apparently non-existent risk management departments would ask "what if the USPS Servers went down?" Hopefully the answer wasn't simply "we're screwed."

In any third party connection for an application I've built, I typically consider the implications of such web service/outside API going down, even if I label it "non vital, don't worry about it" to "have a backup plan". Oh well, no sympathies here

Re:That's what you get....

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's what you get for writing e-commerce packages that rely on 3rd party sites for basic functionality...

Like a credit card processor? How many web stores have more than one?

Re:That's what you get....

[smallshot]

If it's important enough they should have a backup. I know it's not always within budget, but their website doesn't have to crash because the USPS service is unavailable, it could simply fall back to an acceptable solution, such as a fixed price, an estimation table, or an error message that says the USPS shipping estimator is down and shipping will be calculated at the time of shipment, or they can try again later. Yeah, they'll lose some business, but they can lose less business with a decent backup.

Re:That's what you get....

[KevMar]

try {

}
catch (exception ex){

}

Re:That's what you get....

[lysergic.acid]

that's why i design all my e-commerce sites to accept cash only. (always makes sure the bills are facing up before you feed them into the floppy drive!)

Re:That's what you get....

[queequeg1]

But what happens when the cash becomes worthless? Do you have a backup system that defaults to, say, wampum shells?

Re:That's what you get....

[chaim79]

Exactly! Any reliance on an external source (even if it's your own external source) should be able to handle that external source going down, that's just good coding.

All those complaints about products crashing or going down because of this should really yell at the developers of that product, they didn't do basic failure handling.

Re:That's what you get....

[internerdj]

Testing those is hell. But we did get upto 4 shells read before the drive failed from all the sand.

Re:That's what you get....

[compro01]

And how, pray tell, are you to calculate USPS' shipping rate without relying on the USPS' server?

I suppose you could construct a database of USPS rates for every possible box size and weight you might ship, but that would be a maintenance nightmare as you'd have to update it whenever they change their rates and every time you get a new item in stock.

Re:That's what you get....

[afidel]

Most well run ones, though generally not more than two and there are sometimes hidden connections between the two that leads to a common outage.

Re:That's what you get....

[kms_one]

Or, for each package you ship, have the code add an entry in your own database with the stats. When USPS goes down, use your own database. This would be self-updating and should work quite well for a large business that ships to all ends of the country with regularity. It would not be feasible for a small business necessarily.

Re:That's what you get....

[Anonymous Coward]

In actuality, they are providing a third party service and should anticipate issues like this. I my head all I can think is, how stupid are they? It's not like the postal rates change that often, certainly not day by day. Yesterday I was having problems with getting rates using Stamps.com software (overpriced crappy service in the first place), now I know why. I was able to manually make stamps instead simply by looking at a postal rates schedule on a trusty piece of paper. I wonder now why Stamps.com wouldn't be able to have access to this same piece of paper for the data they needed, but apparently they didn't think to put this data in their own database - instead they're relying on the postal service to do all the work for them, while they charge me $16/month to make stamps and shipping labels. I'm calling to cancel my account now - inept fools.

Re:That's what you get....

[PitaBred]

And if the processor is offline, they deal with it. Store the info until it can be charged, whatever. Crashing or otherwise malfunctioning in the face of 3rd party inaccessibility is definitely an app problem, and never excusable.

Re:That's what you get....

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter either way. My company hosts a USPS-owned server ON SITE which we use for a specific task periodically all day long. Not the same as the the shipping API that's busted but it's somewhat similar in purpose.

Today, our USPS server has had issues. It's down due to a nasty software error. There have been many tears shed today over this and many more to come. It's a rather important little server.

Now, the fact that we host the box ourselves and I can go in our server room and see it and touch it and whatever makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to the problem or the solution.

Had it been hosted by the USPS, that might actually have been better for us because the software problem might not have happened. Dunno.

But I do know, having hardware ON SITE is not helping us at the moment and it's not the perfect solution.

Look at it this way, suppose an error like ours happened to multiple sites -and it could: the USPS releases new software for this box every so often and everybody has to apply it. Suppose one of the updates went bad. Then there would be multiple places that needed a fix all at once.

Whereas with the API problem of today, apparently the issue is centralized and once they fix it, everybody is fixed.

Sure everybody hurts in the meantime but there's only ONE box to fix. The time and resources can be focused on that one problem.

Re:That's what you get....

[tekiegreg]

EVERY primary e-commerce solution should have a fail safe for the credit card processor going down. Some suggestions:

1) Storing information offline until processor is back up (might be issues with data retention and privacy though)
2) A warm backup credit card processor ready to go (heck even if it's just a paypal account)
3) Phone number contact to complete the order (may or may not have the staff for this, depends on volume)
4) Last resort, a friendly message offering to store the order sans credit card until provider is back up...

Re:That's what you get....

[southlander]

Part of the issue is the USPS servers are not failing consistently. Sometimes they allow a connection and respond so slowly to requests that the ecommerce app. times out. Sometimes they allow no connections and return nothing. Sometimes they are simply returning shipping rates of 0.00. So any live "backup" would have to allow for all that, at least.

Re:That's what you get....

[Zerth]

At a place I worked at, our rate table for anything up to 40 pounds or around ... I think 9 linear feet to anywhere in north america fit on a single piece of paper, front and half of the back. The remaining half sheet had the rules for everything larger or denser than that.

I'm suprised I don't still remember the # of feet, there was a poster of it outside my office for years. Well, it was replaced every 6 months or so, but everything but the dollars stayed the same.

Re:That's what you get....

[JoelKatz]

"While in principle I agree with that, what are they supposed to do? They are quoting you a price for a service they don't provide themselves."

Fail gracefully. For example, state that they are unable to price that shipping option at that time. Offer you to accept the option without knowing the price, select another type of shipping, or get an email when they know.

Designing software to gracefully handle external failures is a vital real-world programming skill.

Re:That's what you get....

[morgan_greywolf]

Boy, I can't wait till the Feds are in charge of my health care!

Like how they were in charge of creating the intarweb?

Re:That's what you get....

[fingerfucker]

While in principle I agree with that, what are they supposed to do? They are quoting you a price for a service they don't provide themselves.

Precisely! You are supposed to have your own service (which looks like USPS's own, i.e. it offers the same WSDL in case of a web service) and include it as a fall-back option if USPS starts failing too many times. Then, it's really a no-issue because you have several different options from a business perspective:

• make your service offer a "free shipping special" - then get USPS to give you a credit when you actually ship with them. If you can't get them to do it, be ready to absorb cost.
• make your service offer an approximation of a USPS rate - you can make the logic as accurate or as crude as your development resources allow (from maintaining shipping tables, through some statistical approximation based on existing orders, through a simple formula you devise, to a constant cost). Then get USPS to give you a credit for the difference, if there is one.

Ideally, in terms of your own infrastructure or design, your shipping cost services should be abstracted away from vendor-specific APIs so your core sales workflow code calls your own API, which then you implement in various ways. E.g. you end up with 1. UPS, 2. DHL, 3. USPS, 4. your own service). Alternatively, you end up with #1, #2 and #3 only but #3 is designed in such a way that #4 kicks in to replace #3 while #3 continues misbehaving.

This is not too complex, especially if you go for a simpler case, i.e. a formula-based approach.

Of course, from a business perspective, you are facing the decision of whether you're willing to accept some potential loss on a difference in estimated and actual shipping cost while the problem persists or whether you're willing to loose all those orders during the outage.

However, since the carrier is the service provider who failed here, you should be able to justify and negotiate passing on some of that shipping cost difference onto them.

Re:That's what you get....

[EvilIdler]

Wouldn't it be easier to have a background task update the USPS prices, and just use the last working snapshot?

Re:That's what you get....

[PitaBred]

You most certainly ARE allowed to store the info. I used to work for a company that processed credit cards quite often. You cannot store it after you complete the purchase, but you HAVE to store it at least temporarily before submission to the CC processing company. You can even submit them in batches if you want. There more certainly are rules, but you still have to be able to finish the purchase.

Re:That's what you get....

[Angostura]

In the submitter's case, that's what you get for writing an application that doesn't provide a decent error report when a 3rd party API call fails. Surely that should be pretty standard coding.

Proof that computers corrupt all!!!!

[banbeans]

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"

But the computers will!!!

Re:Proof that computers corrupt all!!!!

[lastchance_000]

"We'll deliver any package you bring to us...with the correct postage! BWAHAHAHAAA!"

What can Brown do for you?

[HeavyD14]

Provide a web service, apparently.

Re:What can Brown do for you?

[HeavyD14]

No kidding. UPS *is* up and running, while USPS *is not*. Therfore, Brown can provide a web service.

Re:What can Brown do for you?

[morgauo]

Umm... it's been a little over a year since I tried to do anything with UPSs webservice but the last I tried it it was pretty much just a random number generator. Or maybe shipping prices for a paralled universe or something. They never matched the quotes from their desktop app which prints the shipping labels.

At least a webservice which is down isn't misleading. I still prefer USPS!!

Re:What can Brown do for you?

[Anonymous Coward]

While UPS is up and USPS is down, do you happen to know if the UPS at USPS is the cause for the UPDT (unplanned down time)?

Re:What can Brown do for you?

[Anonymous Coward]

UPS is slow as hell though. Plus they have delivered to the wrong house (sometimes not even on the same street) enough time to make me leery. I was sad when Newegg switched to UPS instead of FedEx for their saver shipping.

USPS is much faster than UPS (pretty much any service is faster than UPS) but they piss me off by often not even delivering the package and making me go get it at the post office because the mail dude is too lazy to stop of get out of his truck (once the guy drove across my lawn, making huge ruts, just so he could toss out the package at my front door without getting out).

FedEx and DHL have given me the best service and cheaper than UPS.

Re:What can Brown do for you?

[qopax]

Living in New York, UPS had consistently much faster service for me than Fedex or USPS, and the mailman would even come back later in the evening in case I wasn't home in the afternoon.

Fedex, on the other hand, had left a "no one home" notice SEVERAL times when I was home all day (I suspect due to the fact that I lived on the 4th floor of an apartment building with no elevators), and I always experienced slower delivery times.

This is why anecdotal evidence is worthless.

Re:What can Brown do for you?

[fyngyrz]

They never matched the quotes from their desktop app which prints the shipping labels.

Also, at the end of the month, they append a "fuel charge" that is completely unpredictable and not represented in the cost at the label printing time in any way, shape or form. You can't derive an estimate for it from the price of oil, from the price of fuel, from last month... no way to do it that I know of, and UPS agrees. Best thing you can do is take last month's charge and distribute it across your best estimate of what this month's shipping will be, then incorporate the cumulative delta into the next month, be it plus or minus.

Also, you should *always* have a general estimate process that can price and ship packages without the exact shipping costs from the shipper. If you don't do this, your entire business can grind to a halt. In order to facilitate this, you need detailed shipping analysis modules that can plug back into the shipping price code, with "fudge" inputs from management as called for. If customers object, a simple letter with an explanation that external services (USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc) were down, requiring an estimate to be used instead of an actual cost, along with a refund if called for. This is simple, fair and will resolve nearly any issue.

Fixed price shipping solves a large amount of this; drive the fixed price from longer term analysis and the whole issue of external pricing moves out of the "can we ship this package, today" zone for your business, and into the shipper's lap (where it belongs, really.)

The only reason shipping should actually fail is if the shipper doesn't show up, or won't accept the package. Otherwise -- if you designed the system, wrote/managed the code -- it's your fault. Every computer in your system should have failover backup, every machine should be backed up across the network to *at least* two machines with the same hardware configuration, ready to take the load with no more than an IP change, and every machine should be on it's own stable, uninterruptible power supply. Spare routers, switches and external interfaces.

UPS creates a bottleneck by providing underpowered, unreliable, non-backed up systems that talk to UPS in order to create shipping labels; when those go down, you're in trouble. This is, in essence, a UPS problem -- not that anyone will be any happier about it. :o) What you can do (and what we do) is put those machines on their own uninteruptable power supplies, add lots of extra RAM to them (never underestimate what this will do for any version of Windows, much less UPS's junky label apps), and keep them clean and well ventilated. Bloody things in our shipping department run Windows 2000. No kidding. Ugh. UPS insists this is what they need.

With the USPS, when all else fails, put everything in a bag and drop it off at the post office with a smile. Hand 'em a check when they give you a total.

Re:What can Brown do for you?

[Anonymous Coward]

NYC is a whole different matter that most people in the US don't have to deal with.

Re:What can Brown do for you?

[Inthewire]

UPS fuel surcharges are based on a rolling monthly average - air shipments are based on the Gulf Coast Kerosene Jet Fuel monthly average, ground shipments are based on the US On-Highway Diesel Average.

Another option would be to get the UPS zone tables, rate tables, and rules tariff, and write a little app to handle the calculation yourself. Make sure to include your discount and your monthly incentive.

Like most things, it's not hard if you know how to do it.

To quote the UPS website on how ground fuel surcharges are calculated:

Ground Fuel Surcharge UPS uses an index-based surcharge that is adjusted monthly. Changes to the surcharge will be effective the first Monday of each month and posted approximately two weeks prior to the effective date. For your billing convenience, we will also post a 90-day surcharge history. The surcharge will be based on the National U.S. Average On Highway Diesel Fuel Prices reported by the U.S. Department of Energy for the month that is two months prior to the adjustment. (UPS research has shown this index is highly correlated with other major fuel price indices worldwide.) For example the surcharge for January 2008 is based on the November 2007 National U.S. Average On Highway Diesel Fuel Price.

Great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

When servers go down, the best idea is to Slashdot them.

Crashing Web store applications?

[truthsearch]

Only a really terrible developer would hit a web services API and not code for it to fail. No one should expect a third party service to be up 100%. The apps should fail gracefully. Anyone finding their e-commerce software handling this situation poorly should find another package.

If a store offers only the USPS delivery method and the web service is down, the user could be directed to call the sales number to place their order. If the store offers other deliver methods the store front could instruct the user that USPS isn't currently available and they must choose another method.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[Frosty Piss]

osCommerce is well know to be a bowl of spaghetti code and in general a P.O.S. Zen Cart forked a long time ago and did a complete code re-write. osCommerce continues to keep their heads up their asses, and only a fool doesn't look for alternatives at the earliest opertunity.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[seanadams.com]

Only a really terrible developer would hit a web services API and not code for it to fail. No one should expect a third party service to be up 100%. The apps should fail gracefully. Anyone finding their e-commerce software handling this situation poorly should find another package.

I have developed a fulfillment system using UPS so I have some experience with this. This was a few years ago, but at the time, UPS's system was designed on the assumption that a shopping cart system would contact UPS during the order placement process (or checkout). USPS appears to be very similar. This is incredibly moronic, because it means that if their server doesn't respond or any reason, you simply lose the sale. Problems AFTER the order has been accepted are far less serious - that just means fulfillment is interrupted - you don't lose orders. It would be even better if you could print the labels without having to reach their server, but they don't provide this (UPS's own software, however, can.)

The only reasonable way to do it (obviously?) is to have your own shopping cart software calculate the shipping rate. At the time I did this in 2001, UPS did not offer reasonable data to let you do this. Their rating system is extremely complicated, and the spreadsheets they gave me had clearly been maintained by hand and needed a lot of massage to get them into a reasonably parseable format. Not only that but it was very difficult to get these tables in the first place, requiring multiple escalations through tech reps and ultimately a "god damn it just give him the tables" from our sales rep.

I imagine things might have improved a little since then and I know there are shopping carts that can now do the rate calculations internally. But if any shipping company forces its customers to contact a server to calculate shipping costs, then they are just as retarded as the merchants who use them (for a web checkout).

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[Itninja]

True. Even the budget ecomm solutions like Squirrelcart have a 'rules system' that allow 'what if' shipping charges to be provided in case the shippers API service is unavailable.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[JoelisHere]

it's against the agreement/policy/licenses/contract that developer's have to sign before being given access to the web service.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[truthsearch]

Most e-commerce sites, including the ones I've built, have a multi-step process to place an order. If the step for shipping (or tax, etc.) failed, then the system would re-load the page with any appropriate messages and option changes. So, for example, if the third-party payment processing service didn't respond before a timeout the user would be asked to call customer service to complete their order. The sales rep could see the order in its incomplete state and finish it over the phone.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[nickruiz]

Additionally, the system could cache the shipping rates for previously entered zip codes and used the cached rates as a fail-safe mechanism.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[TubeSteak]

If a store offers only the USPS delivery method and the web service is down, the user could be directed to call the sales number to place their order.

You do realize that using a phone number as your fall back is a just a different disaster waiting to happen.

Very few online stores have enough idle/re-taskable manpower (much less sufficient phone lines) to handle the sales volume that normally goes through their website.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[moderatorrater]

And what happens when they change those tables? Sounds like you're asking for a world of business hurt down the road with the costs to update the code and cover the changed price.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[truthsearch]

Then if the third-party service goes down, they should charge a flat rate for shipping or offer it free. Otherwise they deserve to lose customers for not planning for this type of issue.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[Cyrcyr]

There is almost no end to how true parent is. I was tasked by a friend to find a solid, open source webshop for him (a startup clothing business), and while (admittedly lazy) browsing around, I found that osCommerce was well used so I assumed this was a good idea, and recommended it to him. Not a day later he called me up again to help him out with adding a few plugins (very simple things as well, and also quite popular). I assumed this was because he didn't know php very well, so I said sure, but when I started going through the plugins, how to implement them, I realized how horribly they clash with eachother, and how extremely unmodular the whole software is. The original code is a mess, and any attempt to make it modular has made it an even bigger pile of spaghetti than it originally was. A good example of this is how the plugins are documented; "Add between "IF" on line x and ". I'm amazed it's popular at all. Now, I realize there are alot of good open source applications out there, and I've had the pleasure to being a part of a few really well written pieces as well, but am I the only one who thinks that alot of popular open source projects are stinking piles of crap? Another good example of this is phpBB, suffering from the exact same issues as osCommerce; very poor modularity and messy code. I'm a strong supporter of open source, but one has to realize that just because a project is open source, and has alot of users and contributors, this does in no way ensure that it is well written.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[seanadams.com]

And what happens when they change those tables? Sounds like you're asking for a world of business hurt down the road with the costs to update the code and cover the changed price.

The tables don't change very often. When they need to do a quick rate bump it is usually in the form a simple "fuel surcharge". Even when the tables are updated, it can usually be very closely approximated by applying a simple percentage increase.

Also, most sites put a significant markup on shipping (that's the "handling" part), so small changes aren't important. We applied different markups of our own depending on the shipping rate and destination, and in some cases we even discounted shipping and ate the difference in order to promote sales in areas where the shipping cost would otherwise be prohibitive, such as the Nordic countries.

But even when you're setting your own rates to some degree, the tables are still needed because of big disparities due to geography, particularly when dealing with foreign countries. However, any particular destinations don't fluctuate much relative to each other, they pretty much all move together. So you can easily go a few years between updating the tables, just applying percentage modifiers as needed.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[WTF Chuck]

but am I the only one who thinks that alot of popular open source projects are stinking piles of crap?

I would probably say something in agreement, and even add a bit of my own comments, but I don't feel like burning up my karma today.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[seanadams.com]

Most e-commerce sites, including the ones I've built, have a multi-step process to place an order. If the step for shipping (or tax, etc.) failed, then the system would re-load the page with any appropriate messages and option changes. So, for example, if the third-party payment processing service didn't respond before a timeout the user would be asked to call customer service to complete their order. The sales rep could see the order in its incomplete state and finish it over the phone.

I would not consider that an acceptable failure mode. I think you overestimate the patience of the online shopper - you would lose a lot of sales making them jump through hoops like that. Not to mention, who are all these sales guys that you'll have on staff ready to take calls- are you going to pay them to sit there even while the web site is working?

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[cyberfunkr]

You can program for the unexpected. But you can't always program for the WTF. Here are some of the situations I've seen:

* Web service servers (WSS) was firewalled by the hotshot new IT guy looking to make things secure.
* Only some of the WSS are up causing delays or incomplete data. Important when teamed with Google Checkout that expects 8 second turn around.
* All WSS are up, but due to their load balancing and missed updates they are running different versions of the API software. (So sometimes you get the latest, sometimes you get a revision back, and sometimes a mixture).
* The WSS are fine, but a trunk between your server and them is causing missed packets and delays.
* The WSS are fine, but the API developers made a change and didn't tell anyone.
* The WSS are fine, but the servlet is refusing connections.
* The WSS are fine, the servlet does a handshake, and then hangs.
* The WSS are fine, but the servlet is broken and either sending back nulls or zeros.
* Same as above but instead of sending no data, it sends bogus "test" data. So shipping a piano across the country costs the same as shipping a box across the street.

You can program for when things pass and when things fail, but it's not so clear cut programming for when it's in the middle.

if (!pass && !fail) {
  print "When In Trouble Or In Doubt Run In Circles Scream And Shout";
}

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[truthsearch]

Well, yes. All of the e-commerce sites I've worked on had in-house or outsourced phone staff. But my point is that a site must have some sort of failure mode. Whether it's to call customer service, give free or flat shipping, or whatever, it's better that the customer can complete the sale than see an arcane error message that the system has failed.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[seanadams.com]

Well, yes. All of the e-commerce sites I've worked on had in-house or outsourced phone staff. But my point is that a site must have some sort of failure mode. Whether it's to call customer service, give free or flat shipping, or whatever, it's better that the customer can complete the sale than see an arcane error message that the system has failed.

You're missing the point - your rate calculator should not even be such a point of failure in the first place. If you do the calculation yourself then it is not dependent on internet connectivity or the shipper's server being responsive.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[Rorschach1]

osC is insidious. You install it because it's open source and a zillion other sites are using it, so it can't be THAT bad, right? Then you have to install a few contributions to add the basic functions you need - and with each contribution, adding the next gets harder and harder.

But you get up and running. Then you discover all of the little annoying usability quirks - US state names don't use proper abbreviations, customers in Ireland can't place an order without a post code even if you set the minimum length to zero, the payment option selection looks like it has a default selected when it doesn't, users don't know that 'authorize.net' is actually the credit card payment option, and so on.

So you spend hours fixing those. Meanwhile, you've got the database populated with all of your products, and you're using it to track sales figures. Maybe you add some back-end order processing stuff for your own convenience.

Eventually this mass of haphazardly patched spaghetti code becomes an absolute nightmare to do ANYTHING with, but by this point you've spent so many hours working on it that it's easier to just keep slogging away at it than to just abandon the whole thing, install something new, and try to move your catalog and your sales records over to the new system.

And THAT is why there are so many osCommerce sites.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[Velex]

It's called a call center.

I work for one.

But that's ok. I can understand why you didn't think about it. Call centers don't do anything good at all. We just fuck shit up.

Re:Crashing Web store applications?

[iVillageIdiot]

I have an eCommerce site using USPS to retrieve Zip+4 info for shipping addresses. In my case, the problem was not that the USPS service failed, but rather that it succeeded and returned empty zip code and plus4 information for the requested address. Had the service failed, my site would have experienced no issue whatsoever. It is the fact that the USPS service returned a valid 'success' response that included empty zip and plus4 values that caused the problem. Luckily in my case, this only resulted in a few orders having an empty zip code, rather than any kind of system crash. However, the empty zips caused my client considerable consternation. Of course, once I identified the cause of the problem, I added code to validate the returned zip and plus4 values from the USPS service, even when the USPS response does not indicate any error condition.

Very poor design

[sheldon]

I don't mean the USPS, I mean the people using their service.

They never thought this might fail?

Re:Very poor design

[sunking2]

This is why my company ships 2 of everything that is ordered. One via USPS and the other by UPS, just in case one gets lost. Always need redundancy.

Re:Very poor design

[WilyCoder]

Does your company offer mail order brides?

Re:Very poor design

[Bryansix]

This could actually work if you company was shipping one of those USB keys with a license on them for software which costs like $10k per license.

Re:Very poor design

[garyebickford]

Gee, just like Google's implementation of MapReduce!! :) Only they do three.

Re:Very poor design

[LearnToSpell]

When you have more than one wife, all manner of madness is let loose.

Couldn't have come at a worse time

[RemoWilliams84]

This is sure to piss off a lot of people being between that Thanksgiving and Christmas period. Lets hope nobody that ordered me something is having problems.

Re:Couldn't have come at a worse time

[maxume]

The crap I get, I hope that people buying me things are having problems.

Through snow and sleet and driving rain...

[NinthAgendaDotCom]

...but not through server crashes, apparently. :-)

Why SAS fill eventually fail

[djnewman]

This is a great example of why SAS (Software as a Service) in its current form will eventually fail. The very nature of the Internet is to be disconnected and stateless. If there is no guaranteed delivery at the 5 - 9's level (99.999%), then how can business expect to depend on the service? Mind you, I don't have a better model, but we had better come up with one if we intend to continue using the Internet for commerce!

Re:Why SAS fill eventually fail

[zappepcs]

There is a better way. Code your own backup solution, revert to it when the SaS you are counting on fails. In this case, that would be a static shipping 'estimate' process that substitutes data when the USPS service fails. Writing code what depends on a third party is dangerous. If your business depends on that software you are fooling yourself if you think it won't fail. It will. This is where coding disaster recovery functions into your system is important.

Many of the posts here are about how stupid this situation is, but people are like that. There is a better solution: don't rely on SaS to hold your business together on a daily basis.

Re:Why SAS fill eventually fail

[Chris Mattern]

There is a better way. Code your own backup solution, revert to it when the SaS you are counting on fails.

If you've coded your own solution and you're ready to run it, what the hell do you need SaS for?

Re:Why SAS fill eventually fail

[zappepcs]

In this case, you might want to only guarantee prices quoted from USPS and use your data as 'estimates' in the event that your own data is wrong and costs change at shipping time.

In yet other cases, the backup plan might simply be to use data from last week or yesterday if that is sufficient, but is data that is held in house on your servers.

Depending on the situation and requirements, any number of solutions are possible. By using a 'back up' solution that is not as good or perhaps as accurate, when the system fails to the back up, you have something that is workable if not 100% perfect or accurate.

You may indeed have a backup solution that is 100% accurate etc. and that is good. It's purpose is still a backup if that is how you configure the systems. You could also choose not to use the SaS and rely totally on your in house solution, but that is not what was being talked about here.

'dotted!

[Anonymous Coward]

thats rhe slashdot effect for ya! :P

Yeah, I noticed that yesterday.

[Jonah Bomber]

I was trying to figure out why one of my Christmas cards to an address got delivered while another one to a different person at the same address got returned marked "VACANT." I called the national number, and the rep I talked to tried to look up the address and said, "Oh, our system is down." But she was still able to give me the number of the PO I needed, so I got my answer from them.

Knew it wasn't just me

[The Orange Mage]

I work at a small used bookstore and we use USPS's own Shipping Assitant program for labels, and I had to do weverything by hand the past two days because the program was whining about some connection error. Lol.

Sounds like fun.

[moniker127]

USPS has IT people? Oiy veih I can imagine that job.

Re:Sounds like fun.

[MadMorf]

USPS has IT people? Oiy veih I can imagine that job.

A few years ago, I used to be one of them...

Oy Vey, indeed...

Re:Sounds like fun.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Did you get the security guy who came in and told you not to surf porn on company time, then ramble about how the USPS computer network was more important than the DOD? I got that, and they tried to do good cop/bad cop on us - it was comical.

Re:Sounds like fun.

[maxume]

You do realize that most of the routing of letters is done by computers, using OCR, right?

Re:Sounds like fun.

[michelled629]

How do you think we have managing through this outage for 3 days!!!

What would USPS do?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It would probably snailmail patches to all the vendors connecting to their site ;-)

Re:What would USPS do?

[rfunches]

You laugh, but older contract offices still get their software updates, including price changes, via mail.

On 3.5" floppy.

The terminals still use green-text monitors.

Lots of free shipping today.

[khasim]

Try it. Go to a USofA-based commercial site and check the shipping charges for your purchase.

Most of the sites are offering free shipping. I'm guessing that these two items are related.

Re:Lots of free shipping today.

[wizbit]

Or, you know, it could be that it's the holidays and eating shipping charges is a major factor in converting sales for online retailers.

Re:Lots of free shipping today.

[TemporalBeing]

Especially such deals are linked to how much a customer buys...

Re:Lots of free shipping today.

[rukcus]

Valid point, but the merchant still must query USPS servers to determine shipping cost when they purchase the postage.

UPS is flaky too

[el_gordo101]

Our website has been suffering from time outs and dropped connections to the UPS rate calculator web service as well since yesterday. Seems to be intermittent, refreshing the page seems to help and it will eventually connect. Luckily none of our customers see the problem as our sales tools are all internal. Happy Holidays!

Same here

[Rorschach1]

I came in yesterday morning to find the USPS module non-functional. Worse, the only working option was DHL overnight - and in case you've missed the news, DHL is now about an order of magnitude worse than the post office for domestic delivery. Even for places they say they can do next-day delivery to, actual delivery can take more than a week.

Why? Because they hand it off to the post office rather than deliver it themselves. Why it takes the post office a week to deliver it when I can get it there in two days by sending it by priority mail myself is a mystery. In any case, DHL's out of the (US) domestic game entirely next month.

My site was up last time I checked, but if the USPS option goes down again, I think it's time for a 'free economy shipping' promotion. No messy rate tables to deal with!

Re:Same here

[The Moof]

DHL is now about an order of magnitude worse than the post office for domestic delivery. Even for places they say they can do next-day delivery to, actual delivery can take more than a week.

I'll second that. Last year, their next-day delivery took 3 weeks.
(No, that's not sarcasm, it actually took three weeks.)

Re:Same here

[rfunches]

It's the same for USPS package services (anything above First-Class Mail). You have to generate a zone chart from your originating ZIP Code before determining shipping rates. Priority is based on zone and weight or, in some cases, zone and size. Parcel Post is based on zone and weight, but some ZIP codes that are major hubs offer cheaper "Intra-BMC" rates.

Re:Same here

[GeckoAddict]

Why it takes the post office a week to deliver it when I can get it there in two days by sending it by priority mail myself is a mystery.

My guess? They get paid less by DHL per package than they do by individuals, so it gets a lower priority.

Re:Same here

[zoney_ie]

That aspect of DHL works to their advantage here in Ireland. We have no post codes, and barely have addresses for many places (even in cities), so the post service are about the only people who know where you live (indeed they don't always, but the person doing the rounds in your area will).

Anyways, the upshot is that DHL may sometimes be flakey here still, but they are a more dependable courier for getting the delivery to your door (rather than say, just managing to get it to "somewhere" in Ireland - I know people who've had to chase up couriers and eventually discover their delivery is stored in a depot somewhere 100 km away or more!)

Saying all that, I don't really want post-codes. It is handy and more human to have easy-to-remember addresses, and the postal service still manages to do better than that in the UK which has post codes. The only thing needed is for the postal service here to be forced to share their pseudo-address database which gets stuff to the appropriate delivery person.

I just wish online stores would stop having *mandatory* post code fields in forms. I now use IRL, because it turns out that putting NA (for non-applicable) can get your delivery sent to Namibia (yes, I kid you not).

Re:Healthcare?

[djnewman]

Um... The post office is private, but protected. Even the best hardware and software fails on occasion. That was my point earlier - we need a better service model if we expect SAS to work. If the small Government crowd had their way the post office would still be the Pony Express. Let's see you get a letter acorss the country in a week for less than 50 cents. UPS and FedX can't - they get $5 for the smallest item. So much for off loading services to business!

Express Delivery

[Statecraftsman]

An unexpected error occurred. An exception occured in module:

USPS

at address: 0x1234 Main St., Hometown USA, zc=0x10001

Re:Healthcare?

[jcnnghm]

The postal service is an independent agency of the US government, like the CIA, the EPA, the FCC, the FTC, NASA, the NSF, the SSS, the SSA, the SEC.

I know why

[Anonymous Coward]

posting anonymously to cover my ass... We upgraded to MySQL 5.1 last week. We had some major table corruption and no backups. Sadly, no one will be fired or even reprimanded for any of this major cluster fuck.

Re:I know why

[/dev/trash]

So why post anonymously then?

Re:Healthcare?

[Capybara]

UPS and FedEx can't, because it's illegal.

hosted vs downloaded/licensed e-commerce

[jrozzi]

The company I work for provides a hosted e-commerce shopping cart solution, SEO-Cart, which supports the USPS Web Tools. Of course the first call coming in for the day was from a client using USPS and having incorrect shipping prices being calculated for their store.

I went ahead and called USPS and the lady who answered was quite rude and explained to me that they had a Worldwide outage which affected other applications than just their Webtools API, and also that they hire a 3rd party company to handle their Webtools API software. She couldn't provide any other information at all and I told her a company of that size should have some sort of fail over plan in place to prevent them from being down as long as they have been. I was really disappointed in the fact she didn't even ask me for my name, phone number, or company by time the conversation was over, but she was probably being bombarded with phone calls all day.

After figuring out that USPS was completely down, I looked through our fail over code and found the following equations seem to come close to the USPS pricing:

National shipping: [cart-weight]*1.6+3.00
International shipping: [cart-weight]*1.6+15.00

These also include pricing for insurance.

After tweaking the fail over pricing code to this, it seemed that everyone using USPS were happy with the results. We also had to decrease the connection timeout set for the request to the USPS Webtools API which was also slowing things down.

The Webtools API seems to be both up and down today, with some orders having shipping prices directly from USPS and others having the fallback pricing. Either way, hopefully their IT department learns from this and also provide us information as to what exactly went wrong.

On that note, this is a prime example that I use when speaking to prospects about the advantages of using a hosted shopping cart solution rather than a licensed/free download solution. Besides the obvious IT benefits that you get with a good hosted shopping cart solution, hosted shopping cart software is typically a centralized application that can provide quick updates to problems like these. Of course this is assuming that the prospect is serious about their online store and doesn't want to handle technical support themselves.

Re:hosted vs downloaded/licensed e-commerce

[Achromatic1978]

1) Yes they should have a failover plan in place. 2) What obligation do they have to you? They provide a free service for your benefit. If your application can't handle issues with a third party API being non-responsive, that's your issue. Or, alternatively, please do point me to the SLA you have with USPS for API access.

Re:hosted vs downloaded/licensed e-commerce

[jrozzi]

I don't think of it as an obligation but more of a convenience to them since integrating in to their open API gives them more business.
I also think that any application that implements 3rd party APIs such as USPS Web Tools should have proper error catching to handle problems such as these.

As of right now, we're still experiencing problems with USPS Web Tools and fail-over pricing is still being set. That means USPS has been having these problems for nearly 40 hours now.

A lot of companies selling on the Internet have lost a lot of money in the last 2 days because of shopping cart software not handling USPS Web Tools correctly. This just points back to why hosted e-commerce solutions such as SEO-Cart, Volusion, Monster Commerce, etc are typically better than licensed / downloaded e-commerce solutions. But USPS is also at fault since they're the source of the problem.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[quanticle]

To be fair, what sort of "backup" calculation would you have done here, short of reverse-engineering the USPS algorithm for calculating shipping rates?

I'm not usually a rabid free-market libertarian, but this here can be seen as a result of the fact that the USPS isn't really beholden to its customers. Can you imagine FedEx or UPS being afflicted by such an issue? And, if they were, would they blow off inquiries with a glib, "We expect the servers to be down for the rest of the day?" Of course not, because, for FedEx, UPS, DHL, et. al. such an outage directly affects the health of the organization. If people can't calculate shipping rates, they can't ship, and if they don't ship, the company doesn't make money. The close linkage between revenue and working services tends to put more impetus behind keeping things working and making sure that they get fixed quickly if they do happen to go down.

No kidding

[xerxesVII]

That's why I use Virgania Horsen's Pony Express.

Oh, Crap!

[beadfulthings]

This explains why my Christmas sales are in the toilet. I'm glad I took a break and decided to read Slashdot. I've had fairly good luck with my OSC connection directly into USPS. Guess not now, huh?

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[LandDolphin]

Why don't more companies just use the old "Shipping & Handling" charge to cover the costs of shipping without having to calculate the rate the the USPS is going ot charge them. Charge a fee that is close to what you expect to pay. Over on a few and under on a few, but should even out at the end.

Cant Get Rebate...

[jjborton]

I currently cannot sign up for a rebate, because MSI's rebate center REQUIRES the address to be verified by USPS, and for 2 hours last night all I was getting was Gateway Not Responding or Server not found errors. they better get it back up by my rebate deadline or I will be pissed.

Oh, and I am already upset that they wont send the rebate to a PO Box, because my street address has never been in the USPS database due to our town requiring us to use their PO Boxes.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[truthsearch]

To be fair, what sort of "backup" calculation would you have done here, short of reverse-engineering the USPS algorithm for calculating shipping rates?

A store can charge whatever they want for shipping. So if they know how much it costs on average to ship their products, they can simply charge everyone that flat rate. Or if they sell something simple, they can charge one simple rate per quantity. Or they could cache the last rates they charged and reuse those. Or they could offer everyone free shipping and eat it as the cost of doing business with the USPS.

Re:Healthcare?

[Waffle Iron]

The government can't even manage to keep a simple web service online, and people still believe that it would be wise to let them control health care.

Get real. On several occasions, I've had to manually intervene to fix idiotic billing f*ckups between my PRIVATE insurer and a PRIVATE hospital, who had entered into mutual contracts to be in the same "network". For some reason, they couldn't get their own computers to talk to each other and I had to fix their bugs by going deciphering cryptic paper printouts myself and wasting hours calling customer service. This kind of stupid private healthcare IT problem happens routinely to millions of people every year. Therefore, using your reasoning I conclude that due to a clear history of incompetence, it is unwise to let private parties handle health care, and such practice should be banned.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[TemporalBeing]

Because it's no longer reliable enough. The S&H charges change based on too many values for the few factors (carrier, size, weight, destination, type of delivery, timing of delivery, etc.), and things change. So it's not a necessarily easy calculation to perform.

You have to do it before.

[maillemaker]

Retail customers expect to check out knowing the full price they will be paying, including shipping. This means that you HAVE TO calculate shipping during order placement (checkout). You're asking for customer service headaches if you have to manually charge shipping after the customer has already (they thought) completed the order.

So your only option, if you don't want to rely on a third-party server for shipping costs, is to have your shopping cart do its own calculations.

Re:You have to do it before.

[Bryansix]

OR you could attempt to contact the remote services servers. If that fails you calculate as best as possible. If after the calculation you find the shipping was actually more then you eat the cost. If it was less then you charge the customer less when you run their card through the batch commit at the end of the night.

Re:Healthcare?

[Chris Mattern]

Let's see you get a letter acorss the country in a week for less than 50 cents. UPS and FedX can't - they get $5 for the smallest item.

Sure they can. However, they aren't allowed to because it is ILLEGAL UNDER FEDERAL LAW. So much for the Post Office being "private".

USPS

[gnosi]

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"

But the computers will!!!

You do realize that this has never been the motto or creed of the USPS.

It is taken from the courier service of the Persian Empire. See Wikipedia.

--
This is not the sig you are looking for... Move along...

Re:USPS

[powerlord]

See Wikipedia.

Sure, but it would have been easier if you had provided a link at least.

The motto will also continue to be mistaken for the motto of the USPS so long as the USPS does nothing to correct that.

The motto is prominently carved over the U.S. General Post Office in NYC

The building prominently bears the inscription: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, which is frequently mistaken as an official motto of the United States Postal Service. It was actually supplied by William Mitchell Kendall of the firm of McKim, Mead & White, the architects who designed the Farley Building and the original Pennsylvania Station in the same Beaux-Arts style. The sentence is taken from Herodotus' Histories (Book 8, Ch. 98) and describes the faithful service of the Persian system of mounted postal messengers under Xerxes I of Persia. The USPS does not actually have an official motto or creed, but nonetheless the inscription on the building is often recognized as such. The inscription was carved by Ira Schnapp, who later designed the Action Comics logo and many other iconic logos for DC Comics.

and the USPS even used it in their own television spot (albeit in an altered form):

The commercial, which ran after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the anthrax mailings, featured no voiceover, only the following text interspersed on title cards:
We are mothers and fathers. And sons and daughters. Who every day go about our lives with duty, honor and pride. And neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor the winds of change, nor a nation challenged, will stay us from the swift completion of our appointed rounds. Ever.[2]

Note that the [2] link in the above quoted Wikipedia article takes you to this page on the USPS site quoting the exact text of the tvspot.

Yes, they have no Motto, but considering how much they use the meme, they might as well have one.

Re:USPS

[gnosi]

I would say that the USPS pretends that that is their motto only in such away that they can claim "Look how dedicated we are!!" but deny an implied service level agreement to such standards.

--
There is but one Truth: there is no sig

Re:USPS

[socsoc]

This is not the sig you are looking for... Move along...

You're right... I have sigs turned off asshole. Thanks for manually placing that in your comment.

Re:USPS

[powerlord]

I agree, and I was trying to find a succinct way of putting it, so I'm glad you did. I still wouldn't be surprised if it is their informal "mission statement". :)

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[Mister Whirly]

Forget the cigarettes - they are taxed way to heavily on the federal and state level. Well, unless they "fell off a truck".

USPS rate API SUCKS

[Bitsy Boffin]

Apart from the trouble reported in this /. article which I found occuring on one of the existing sites I wrote yesterday (simply because there were no USPS prices being returned, no error, but took about 30 seconds to work out what happened), USPS simply sucks ass.

Here's why:

Some time ago, they had an API to get rates, it was called RateV2.
Then they "updated", and now have RateV3.
RateV3 is the only specification published.
To get access to the Rate API servers, you must first test your implementation against thier testing servers successfully, when they see that they let you on the production server....

Thier testing servers only work with a limited version of RateV2.

So, in order to use the USPS API, you must:

    Write to the now unpublished RateV2.
    Test that RateV2 on the test servers.
    Ask USPS to allow you to use Production (and get the keys etc) because you have successfully tested.
    Write completely new code against RateV3.
    Test that RateV3 on the production servers.

And if you try and show the USPS staff the logical problem in this process, they will reply "I can not put you on production servers, until you have done three successful tests on the test servers".

Re:USPS rate API SUCKS

[SnarfQuest]

If you want to get USPS's attention, FexEx them a package. For some reason, it really pisses them off.

Re:USPS rate API SUCKS

[Fulcrum of Evil]

This is true - they really hate it when the fedex guy shows up.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[PitaBred]

If TFSummary is to be believed, the least they could do is make sure the app didn't crash on bad data returned from an API. There is NO excuse, ever, for a crashing bug in an online store app like that. There's no problem with the USPS servers being funky, there's a problem when people programming dependent apps somehow didn't at least plan on it ever happening.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[Yez70]

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to look at a postal rate schedule - the postal service does provide them for all shipping services with clearly marked zones to figure out how much to pay for postage.

You think that's bad -check the Unemployment sites

[Metroid72]

The California EDD (Employment Development bureau that handles unemployment) www.edd.ca.gov signup website and their phone systems are literally non-responsive.

Maybe more people are filing for unemployment than trying to get their stuff shipped.

Re:Healthcare?

[WillDraven]

Well we certainly wouldn't want private companies running our postal service, why think of all the unsolicited advertisements we'd end up with crammed into our mailboxes every day! oh, wait...

"Crashes"?

[John Hasler]

Seems to me that a program that crashes rather than degrading gracefully when a remote network resource becomes unavailable needs a bit of work.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine FedEx or UPS being afflicted by such an issue?

Having worked in IT for one of them this year... yes, without question, yes.

Re:Healthcare?

[WTF Chuck]

USPS generates lots of it's revenue from bulk rate mail. Like it or not, that junk mail the mailman always delivers is what keeps our postal rates low.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[pauljlucas]

... [F]or FedEx, UPS, DHL, et. al. such an outage directly affects the health of the organization. If people can't calculate shipping rates, they can't ship, and if they don't ship, the company doesn't make money.

The same has been true with the USPS since 1970. Their entire budget is financed by people buying stamps and other services. They don't get a dime of taxpayer money.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[tekiegreg]

and if the livelihood of my business depended on it you better be damn well sure I'll have my application ready to crunch each of these factors manually in determining shipping cost...it's terminally stupid to do otherwise...

What Have We Learned From This?

[LifesABeach]

The call from the User to the parent poster m2pc could not have been a fun one. But some interesting Ah-Ha's can be gleaned from this event. "Try-Catch-Finish" can be a troubling paradigm, but when your user employs the administrative technique of MBH, ( Management By Hysteria ), having your program tell you what its inputs were, and what the response was from the "other guy's" server in a nice log file can be; satisfying. This problem could have been reduced further by having the program email any nonstandard messages from the offending server to the maintainer of the software. These two little tricks have made me more Pro-Active, than Re-Active when it comes to spending time on problems, and it keeps customers longer.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[rfunches]

The zones are clearly marked but determining which zone you are shipping to is not. They are based on distance from the originating ZIP Code so the application must use Postal Explorer to generate the zone chart ahead of time. (For now, it happens to be working.) And in the case of non-flat-rate Priority Mail, there's a huge price difference between zone 4 (zone and weight only) and zone 5 (zone and weight *OR* zone and size).

Goober!!!

[zoomshorts]

Herodatus (sp) , not the Post Office.

The Post Office's motto is "the price of stamps just went up".

Re:Goober!!!

[Bryansix]

I thought the Post Office's motto was "We suck at life so you can feel better about yourself". Boy was I off base.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[homer_s]

The same has been true with the USPS since 1970. Their entire budget is financed by people buying stamps and other services. They don't get a dime of taxpayer money.

Except, they get to charge an exorbitant amount for their stamps and services by prohibiting competition - a luxury that Fedex and UPS do not have. (If you think their costs are reasonable, then why is there a law the prohibiting Fedex/UPS from charging below a certain amount?)

Re:Healthcare?

[homer_s]

Let's see you get a letter acorss the country in a week for less than 50 cents. UPS and FedX can't - they get $5 for the smallest item. So much for off loading services to business!

First of all, Fedex and UPS are legally prevented from setting a rate below a certain number ( I don't remember what that is).
Secondly, Fedex and UPS are not allowed to deliver normal mail - only 'urgent packages'. That is why you see all the fancy mailers and boxes from them and not a simple envelope that will keep costs down.
Lastly, USPS uses Fedex to transport mail since it is cheaper.

Re:Healthcare?

[Bryansix]

I actually think the Government should compete in the Healthcare Industry and offer health insurance to everybody AT COST. This would drive down the costs of competitors and drive up service.

Did I do that?

[dilvish_the_damned]

My brother accidentally ordered a 120 foot HO scale rail road set with the foam peanuts individually packaged.
He got confused and put in Amazon.com HQ as the shipping address.
Also he used Discover card.
Is this a DOS attack and should I report him?

The fact that some people seem to think this is a *big thing* really shows USPS has been doing a decent job. Failure happens to the best of us. ( Except for you of course. )
I give them a tentative A+ despite the current issue. Hell, they get a C baseline for trying.
Really? it was that reliable? I would call that a government success -- assuming failure is a good metric, I know I do.
Crap, I twisted my brain again while talking government. As you were, whilst I untie this flawed logic... Can I get some help here? Its choking me.

why does this need to be synchronous?

[Rick Bentley]

Seriously, why does anyone's checkout SW need realtime synchronous connection to the shipper? Why can't it be asynchronous with a local cache of the relevant data?

Synchronous is just dumb. Most other Internet applications don't work that way. DNS is a great example of data being cached everywhere, yet still centrally update-able. E-mail is another great example of quick communication w/o requiring a synchronous connection.

I can't believe that a small shipping application couldn't be left locally with each partner that provides cached rate information and handles the API whether or not USPS/UPS/whomever is up to manage it.

Re:Healthcare?

[jcnnghm]

Great idea, that provides all the benefits without the glaring pitfalls.

Re:Healthcare?

[ThrowAwaySociety]

If the small Government crowd had their way the post office would still be the Pony Express. Let's see you get a letter acorss the country in a week for less than 50 cents. UPS and FedX can't - they get $5 for the smallest item. So much for off loading services to business!

Who do you think operates the trucks and planes that move USPS shipments from station (post office) to station under contract?

The USPS just prints stamps, sorts, and pays letter carriers. The rest is contracted out, and the Big Two handle huge portions of it.

Re:You think that's bad -check the Unemployment si

[Bryansix]

No, that's always been that way. I was unemployed for like three months in the last 6 years. I tried to file for Unemployment and I got no response. Since then I consider the amount they take out of my check every month to cover "Unemployement" to be simple theft. The money is not theirs and they do not hand it out responsibly according to the intent of the law. The California EDD is a total sham and a total failure!

This is what happens when

[StickyWidget]

...65536+1 people send a package at the same time.

~Sticky
//TAG IT 65536+1

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[je ne sais quoi]

then why is there a law the prohibiting Fedex/UPS from charging below a certain amount?)

Oh come on! When you make such an outrageous claim like this, back it up with a reference please. Last time I bought my forever stamps, they were 42 cents a piece. Good fucking luck getting a price anywhere near that in private industry. Sure, I can have a great web-server if I'm like FedEx and charge $30 to mail an envelope. Of course, every time the postal service wants to ask for more money to have updated services like eCommerce whatever, congress complains.

Americans are pathetic sometimes -- they expect their government services to do as well as private industry, yet they don't give them the ability to charge what private industry charges. Amtrak is a similar situation, Amtrak is expected to be cash flow positive, yet they are not allowed to own their own tracks, those are owned by the freight companies, whereas their main competitors run on highways that are paid for completely by the taxpayer and gas taxes, or operate out of airports also funded by taxpayers.

Whiner.

[lancejjj]

The US Postal Service is experiencing major server issues for its shipping API web services. After spending about an hour debugging my own eCommerce software for a client, I found the problem was with the USPS shipping servers being unavailable.

Others have said it, but I'll say it again because I like the beat this philosophy into everyone's head at work:

IMPLEMENT FAULT TOLERANCE.

If a service, internal or external, doesn't work right... make sure that your customers are still mostly satisfied.

It would be IMPOSSIBLE to experience "major server issues" if your damned eCommerce software was designed smartly.

Point the finger all you want. But at the end of the day, this failure is YOURS.

Web services go down, go bad, get attacked, or become unreachable. Plan for it.

That's what you get... for not using Utilities.

[Ostracus]

"Americans are pathetic sometimes -- they expect their government services to do as well as private industry, yet they don't give them the ability to charge what private industry charges. Amtrak is a similar situation, Amtrak is expected to be cash flow positive, yet they are not allowed to own their own tracks, those are owned by the freight companies, whereas their main competitors run on highways that are paid for completely by the taxpayer and gas taxes, or operate out of airports also funded by taxpayers."

Welcome to municipal broadband. Oh wait!

Re:Healthcare?

[jmccue]

UPS and FedEx can't, because it's illegal.

If I remember correctly, the reason for this was to ensure a letter sent to a rural area would cost the same as sending it to New York City. I was quite young when the USPS was created in 1971 and at the time most of my older relatives worked there. So that was a major topic of conversation among my relatives for almost a year. The US Federal Gov had real fears that fully privatizing the PO would cause it to fail as a business and the cost of send/mail a letter to/from a rural area at best would be quite expensive, or maybe even impossible. They believed private competing companies would concentrate their business in population centers, completing ignoring rural areas. 1971 was a much different world than now, and a lot of business relied upon the mail service. Leaving an area without cheap mail (or no mail) service could have caused greater poverty.

That's what you get....osCommerce

[Ostracus]

And that's what you get for writing e-commerce packages that rely on 3rd party sites for basic functionality...

Don't say I didn't tell you so...

osCommerce is an online shop e-commerce solution that offers a wide range of out-of-the-box features that allows online stores to be setup fairly quickly with ease, and is available for free as an Open Source based solution released under the GNU General Public License.

Oh man! My faith in open source software is shaken to it's core.

Re:That's what you get....osCommerce

[xtronics]

Of course that totally ignores shipping modules available for OSCommerce such as tship I suppose you work for one of the proprietary firms??

DEC Alpha Servers?

[Neanderthal Ninny]

I remember at my previous workplace that one of the vendors techs was working at post office also. They were work on DEC (now HP) Alpha servers and that was in 2001. I don't know if those servers are still in use but those servers where great back then but are definitely showing there age now if they are still in use.

Re:DEC Alpha Servers?

[ralphdaugherty]

I don't know if those servers are still in use but those servers where great back then but are definitely showing there age now if they are still in use.

      I've followed the news of a lot of government computer system failures through the years, and the one thing that always gets done before everything collapses is buying new computers and migrating the old software to it as a first step. It's easy, and it sounds like you've done something.

      I guarantee you whatever the problem is is from new software, not old hardware.

  rd

Re:Healthcare?

[je ne sais quoi]

Here's a link from wikipedia, which is a little less biased than the rabid conservatives at the american enterprise institute. From the wikipedia article on what private carriers can carry for time sensitive material:

These letters must either cost at least the greater of $3 or twice what First Class (or Priority) mail service would cost, or they must be delivered within strict time limits or otherwise lose value.

Last I checked, it cost about $14 to use FedEx Supersave to send an envelope, which is a far cry from $3. Private industry is nowhere close to even competing with the USPS for the lowest cost option.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[mandelbaum]

A zone chart subscription in a clearly documented format is available for $50 a year here:

http://www.usps.com/ncsc/addressmgmt/zonechart.htm

We use it for our rate calc, in fact it's all local based calculation since the rate tables are public:

http://www.usps.com/prices/downloadable-pricing-files.htm

I understand that using the API means no work when there is a rate change, but the rates change 1-2 a year with 60 days notice. Not a huge deal.

-aaron

usps, fedex, ups

[phybere]

From my experience, this is common. Even worse than it being down is when it starts returning malformed headers, etc. It's really not fun. FedEx and UPS are no better, particularly with their development servers. It's YOUR time and labor, so they really don't care.

It took you an HOUR to figure that out?

[gatkinso]

Really now.

Atleast you are honest.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[quanticle]

Charge a fee that is close to what you expect to pay. Over on a few and under on a few, but should even out at the end.

That works only as long as your shipping volume is relatively low. If its not, then even small discrepancies in shipping costs can result in the books not balancing, as that "negligible difference" isn't really so negligible when its multiplied by hundreds or thousands of packages.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[quanticle]

I fully agree on that point. At the very least, the application developer ought to have returned a well-formed error message stating something to the effect of, "Sorry, the postal service's servers are down, so we can't calculate your shipping at this time."

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[Zerth]

You have a point.

I used to work for a company that shipped $40 million/year to residences and charged flat rate shipping for almost half of it. Every month we hit within .5% of the actual cost to ship. Whenever the disparity exceeded a certain dollar value in a given week, we added or subtracted 5 cents from the shipping charge for the next week.

It wobbled back and forth like that for years, until one week when we had a sale on 40 pound ferrite cores.

Then we added 10 cents.

The larger your shipping is, the more you can absorb discrepancies if you know already know how much your inventory costs to ship and know where your customers are.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[CoderBob]

Sure, I can have a great web-server if I'm like FedEx and charge $30 to mail an envelope.

If FedEx is charging you $30 to mail an envelope:

• You're shipping it FedEx Express, not FedEx Ground.
• You're sending it a decent distance away, or you've stuffed a 200 page document in that "envelope"
• You're paying for Signature options, time-specific delivery, or any other host of options.

FedEx Ground is the only REAL comparison to the mail service if you're going to base it off 42 cent stamps. Ground from where I'm at covers most of the STATE in one day, and a good portion of neighboring states. It takes me 2 to 3 days to get an envelope to my parents 3 hours away.

Compare apples to apples, please.

Disclaimer: I have worked for FedEx in the past, and have a somewhat unfortunate detailed understanding of how the pricing works.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[JoelKatz]

"To be fair, what sort of "backup" calculation would you have done here, short of reverse-engineering the USPS algorithm for calculating shipping rates?"

I'm sorry, we are unable to calculate your USPS shipping cost at this time. Would you like to:
1) Accept the shipping without knowing the cost.
2) Select a different shipping option.
3) Have us contact you when we know your shipping cost.
4) Accept shipping up to a selected amount and have us contact you if the actual amount is higher?
5) Cancel your order for now, leaving these items in your shopping cart so you can order them later.

It's that simple.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The same has been true with the USPS since 1970. Their entire budget is financed by people buying stamps and other services. They don't get a dime of taxpayer money.

How did you ever get modded +5 informative with that load of bull?

The total funding for the Postal Service in the administration's 2005 budget is just over $61.7 million.

Appropriation, fiscal year 2004 $65,135,000
Appropriations, 1999 $100,195,000
etc, etc

Re:Healthcare?

[Dahan]

Lastly, Fedex and UPS use USPS to transport mail since it is cheaper.

fixed that for you

Apparently Click N' Ship was affected as well....

[bev_tech_rob]

I help a friend of mine fill orders on his Hobby Shop Website yesterday, and couldn't complete any shipments on USPS "Click N' Ship" site. When you would submit new addresses, the apps would reject OUR return zip code, saying it was invalid (even though it had worked fine for months beforehand). Today, you would have to keep resubmitting information after the site would initially reject it, but then accept on second try. Or you would get no shipping options after submitting a new shipping address. You would go back and then forward and it would work... Very frustrating....

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[Free the Cowards]

So does FedEx Ground charge less than 42 cents to send an envelope, or did you just kind of skip the main point?

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[Matt Perry]

then why is there a law the prohibiting Fedex/UPS from charging below a certain amount?)

Oh come on! When you make such an outrageous claim like this, back it up with a reference please.

Here you go. From HR 6407 - Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, section 503 "PRIVATE CARRIAGE OF LETTERS" :

''(b) A letter may also be carried out of the mails when--
''(1) the amount paid for the private carriage of the letter
is at least the amount equal to 6 times the rate then currently
charged for the 1st ounce of a single-piece first class letter;

You can google for "USPS monopoly privilege" and "USPS monopoly law" and get quite a screenful on the subject.

Redux: USPS API fails around the holiday season

[splorp!]

I work for an e-Commerce company and the USPS API did the same thing last year. It gets overwhelmed and can't handle the volume. If you have a decent shopping cart software, set your rates to backup for USPS and you should be fine.

Re:Self-hating developers

[socsoc]

parcel density (lead or feathers)

please tell me how the density is important after you have already accounted for dimensions, shape, weight and service level.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[CoderBob]

I said it was the closest, not a price match. Take a look at the area of next day delivery service you get from FedEx Ground (or UPS for that matter, they're almost identical). Compare that to where you can send something next day USPS.

The post had 2 parts. One, that comparing $30 express service to 42c envelope service through the USPS was a useless comparison ( at least compare USPS priority services) and two, that the USPS is much slower in getting those 42c envelopes delivered than even the cheaper FedEx services, which means you have to add that value judgment into the equation.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[DougWebb]

To be fair, what sort of "backup" calculation would you have done here, short of reverse-engineering the USPS algorithm for calculating shipping rates?

They could have returned to the pre-computer shipping practices to figure out the shipping rate: rolling dice, consulting the Oracle, checking tea leaves, or sacrificing a goat.

Oh no, wait, they didn't do that. They either used a fixed rate or a rate based on the product price range, looked up in a five-row table.

USPS Server Meltdown

[USPSRateCalc]

Hey folks,

The shipping api is down, however the rate calculator is available. We provide the rate calculation engine to the folks that provide the shipping api. The shipping api offers numerous services and we are just one of them.

If you require domestic rates calculations, as received by ShippingAPI.dll, you can access our rate engine directly.

Accessing the rate calculator api is very similiar to how you access this functionality from the shipping api.

Getting started:

A simple demo site that will allow you to learn/test a subset the API:
http://postcalc.usps.gov/domSDK/SDKXMLtest.asp

XML over HTTP Application access:
http://postcalc.usps.gov/SdkXml.aspx

Documentation is available but I do not have a publically available site to post this on. If a site is available, just let me know and I will post the SDK documentation there.

Let me know if I can help.

Adrian Griffith
ManTech Information Systems & Technology
Project Manager, USPS Postal Explorer and Rate Calculators

adrian.griffith@mantech.com

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[Yazheirx]

There are companies out there that provide API based local products to act as a primary. This allows integrators to use the Web API as a backup.

(Shameless Plug Warning)I recommend ProShip by Best Way Technologies http://www.bestwaytech.com/proship. But there are other "acceptable" alternatives out there

Carriers, such as USPS, FedEx, UPS and DHL, can change their rates, services and algorithms quarterly. It is often easier and cheaper to offload said responsibilities to a third party.

USPS Rates Calculator (ShippingAPI Alternative)

[USPSRateCalc]

Hey folks,

The shipping api is down, however the rate calculator is available. We provide the rate calculation engine to the folks that provide the shipping api. The shipping api offers numerous services and we are just one of them.

If you require domestic rates calculations, as received by ShippingAPI.dll, you can access our rate engine directly.

Accessing the rate calculator api is very similiar to how you access this functionality from the shipping api.

Getting started:

A simple demo site that will allow you to learn/test a subset the API:
http://postcalc.usps.gov/domSDK/sdkdemo.htm [usps.gov]

For programmatic access use the XML over HTTP Application:
http://postcalc.usps.gov/SdkXml.aspx

Documentation is available but I do not have a publically available site to post this on. If a site is available, just let me know and I will post the SDK documentation there.

For web site access:
Domestic Retail - http://postcalc.usps.gov/
International Retail - http://ircalc.usps.gov/
Domestic Business - http://dbcalc.usps.gov/

Let me know if I can help.

Adrian Griffith
ManTech Information Systems & Technology
Project Manager, USPS Postal Explorer and Rate Calculators

adrian.griffith@mantech.com

Are we sure that this is such a good idea?

[chaboud]

I know that it's not direct-linked, but is it wise to get anything like this within 100 feet of Slashdot? Could we end up turning "down for the day" into "down for the week?"

Somewhere, someone is finding a way to report that this is good news for the economy. Someone else is finding a way to say that the use of USPS instead of FedEx is bad news for the economy.

Re:Healthcare?

[DigiShaman]

Therefore, using your reasoning I conclude that due to a clear history of incompetence, it is unwise to let private parties handle health care, and such practice should be banned.

Spoken like a true communist.

Re:That's what you get... for not using FedEx

[peg110]

So does FedEx Ground charge less than 42 cents to send an envelope, or did you just kind of skip the main point?

Does the postal service charge a Fuel Surcharge? Is FedEx's Fuel Surcharge MORE than 42 cents? I don't think ANY law here is the issue. If it was then FedEx wouldn't be charging any Fuel Surcharges. Why do they do this? To maximize the profits. The postal service does NOT charge a fuel surcharge, never has. Even without this "Law" I venture to say that the likes of FedEx and UPS would STILL be more than USPS because they need to make a PROFIT. Postal Service needs to SUSTAIN. Profit for the postal service means GROWTH, not Shareholders getting rich. After all the Shareholders of the Postal Service are the American People. Right?

Re:Healthcare?

[Waffle Iron]

Whoosh.