We are pleased to have in place a popular enhancement request: you can now choose to restrict your configured domestic Shipping Promotions to just destinations within the continental US. This will exclude Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and all the US territories.

Just click on the appropriate checkbox in the Domestic section of your Shipping Promotions form.

ShopCart: AuctionInc has addded support for configuring local taxes. An unlimited number of both city and county tax rates can be configured, along with the standard state rates. For any sellers who are based outside the US, we now also support setting non U.S. taxes, including Canadian provinces.

To configure, go to Tax Rates from your AuctionInc Control Center.

If you receive UPS "Daily" rates (ie, you have a Daily UPS pickup), depending on when you started your UPS account, you may be subject to slightly higher rates for air services than are customers who have been with UPS a longer time. If you started your UPS account after Jan 3, 2011, you are paying what UPS calls "standard" rates, rather than "daily" rates. AuctionInc now supports these slightly higher Standard rates for newer UPS customers.

In order to change to Standard rates, log into your AuctionInc account and go to our Carrier Settings page. On the UPS tab, pick the Entry Method titled "Daily Rates (UPS account after 1-3-2011)".

If you are using our XS Shipping Rates API, we have a new Entry Method code for these rates ("Q"). You may wish to consider modifying your sellers' available selection of entry methods on your own forms to add this new option.

UPS says they developed these rates to match FedEx and avoid confusion for customers who are comparing similiar services across the two carriers. Indeed, their Standard rates for air services now exactly match FedEx daily rates for the comparable services.

The most reliable New Year's tradition is the annual rate increase from the private carriers, and 2012 is no expection. Today new rates go live for UPS, FedEx and DHL.

You can read more about these increases here:

UPS rate increase

DHL rate increase

And here is an excellent article analyzing the UPS/FedEx increases: Rate Increase Analysis

USPS will also be raising their rates, including package services and rates for their flat rate boxes, on Jan 22. As always, AuctionInc will be prepared.

We have enhanced the functionality of the two Saturday services we support, i.e., UPS Next Day Saturday Delivery and Fedex Priority Overnight Saturday Delivery. Previously, if you had either of these services enabled in your AuctionInc account (or requested a rating for them in our API) then AuctionInc would return a rate for them, regardless of it really made sense in terms of timing. Now, these rates will only be returned if the rate is requested on Thursdays or Fridays. This should, we hope, make these ratings more useful to you to consider enabling if you sell the type of items where customers ordering towards the end of the week might indeed want to pay the extra fee.

UPDATE [6-27-11]  Canada’s Parliament passed legislation Sunday evening that ordered the country’s 48,000 postal workers back to work. The mail is expected to start flowing on Tuesday morning. USPS is expected to resume providing shipping rates for all USPS services to Canada as of midnight tonight.

[6-21-11]  USPS will not accept packages destined to Canada during the Canada Post lockout for any services other than Global Express Guaranteed (GXG). They have also eliminated rates from all their other services from their rates API, so AuctionInc is currently not able to quote Priority International, Express International, or First Class International to Canada.  If you do not have GXG enabled, and you are not offering international services from any of our other supported carriers, you may want to consider enabling GXG in your AuctionInc during until the lockout has ended. 

There is currently a bill pending in the Canadian government that would force an end to the lockout. It will take until next week, according to news reports, to pass into law.