What are Live Shipping Rates with Shiptheory?
Live Rates with Shiptheory are when Shiptheory communicates with your carrier before an order is booked and receives a price back from the carrier for how much it'll cost to send your shipment with a carrier and service. This can be used to view how much a shipment will cost before you send it with a specific service, or can be used to work out your cheapest option for a shipment.
What carriers support Live Shipping Rates with Shiptheory?
- UPS
- FedEx
- USPS
- DHL Express
We're always looking to add to our list of carriers that support Live Rates, so if you have a carrier you'd like to use Live Rates with, please let us know!
Currently, there are two ways to use Live Rates with Shiptheory, please see them below;
Rates Rules
Rates Rules allow you to construct a new type of shipping rule that can contain one or more shipping services where we fetch available shipping rates for the shipment before automatically booking with the cheapest rate.
To set this up, begin by heading to the shipping rules page on your Shiptheory account. Select "Add New Rates Rule":
Like with standard shipping rules in Shiptheory, you'll want to define the basic rule conditions first, and save. However, unlike standard shipping rules, you will then notice the option provided at the top of the screen "Add New Service Option":
From here, you will want to select all of the service options you wish to be available for selection for orders matching this shipping rule. Note again that all of these services will be checked for live rates when an order is being booked, and the one with the cheapest value will be automatically selected.
Once you have added all of your service options and rule criteria, simply save the rule. Once the rule has been created, it will appear under your shipping rules tab with all other rules, and will appear similar to the following:
There are also some advanced settings and additional notes you may want to be aware of. For some more information on these, please see our dedicated Rates Rules guide here.
Carrier Rates
If you're wanting a slightly more involved and manual approach to checking your rates, you're able to use Carrier Rates to check the cost of a specific carrier and service combo for a shipment. This can be done for any shipment that is yet to be booked in Shiptheory, and as such this may be especially useful if you manually book your orders in Shiptheory or use Mark for Approval rules.
To receive rates for a specific shipment, you'll first want to select "view" on a shipment in your dashboard, then select your carrier, service and any formats and enhancements needed, then click "Get Rates":
After clicking this, Shiptheory will contact your channel, receive the live rates and display these back to you, giving you the ability to select and book your desired service:
We're happy to look into adding Live Rates for any carrier that integrates with Shiptheory, but it's worth noting this functionality is dependant on support from the carrier in question. As such, there may be some carriers that we aren't able to build Rates support for at this time.
If you have any issues or questions when using Live Rates with Shiptheory, please feel free to Contact Support.