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FedEx Web Service Downtime Jan 17-18 2009

fredfred FoxyCart Team
in Important News edited January 2009
This just in from FedEx's web team:
Dear Valued FedEx Customer:

Please be advised that there will be a temporary service interruption on
Jan. 17, 2009 due to system updates and our quarterly corporate load.
Customers using FedEx Web Services, FedEx Ship Manager(r) API and FedEx
Ship Manager(r) Direct solutions within our production environment will
experience interruptions during the following times:

Saturday, Jan. 17, 2009: All systems and services will be interrupted
beginning at 9 p.m. CST until 10:30 a.m. CST on Sunday, Jan. 18, 2009.

Please ensure that your appropriate team members are aware of these
temporary service interruptions.

We regret any inconvenience. If you have any questions or need technical
assistance, please contact one of our technical support representatives
via e-mail at websupport@fedex.com or
call 1.877.339.2774.

Please reference the enclosed document for more details about the
service interruption and future enhancements.

Thank you for choosing FedEx.

The FedEx Web Integration Solutions Team

For those of you using FedEx shipping, please turn on other shipping options such as UPS or USPS over this weekend. We'd hate for you to lose any sales.
Comments
  • rthrashrthrash Member
    How high on the list of priorities is rate table caching so this type of issue isn't a problem?
  • lukeluke FoxyCart Team
    Right now, getting 041 (with recurring shippable products) out the door is the primary thing we're working to accomplish. After that, it's a user api.

    As for a shipping rate caching system, how long do you think we should hold the responses? Should they be held indefinitely and only cleared out by a button in the admin or should we keep them for, say, 24 hours? Should the amount of time to save the cache be configurable? If a customer uses a cached value but the live value is different, how do we handle that?

    Thanks thrash. As always, we really appreciate your input.
  • rthrashrthrash Member
    I would cache rates weekly. In the event their API fails to return a valid result 2x use the cached rates.

    How often do rates change? Until you can use your contract/discounted rates, I'd probably just update the rate tables whenever changes occur. I don't think that's realistically more than a few times a year.

    Really, which brings up another point of doing authorize-only transactions with shipping estimates for checkouts and applying the real shipping fees and capturing the the transaction at fulfillment. That might make more sense for heavy goods with high shipping expenses.
  • brettbrett FoxyCart Team
    Note (since we're going off topic anyway): Auth-only transactions can be captured for any amount _up to_ the authorized amount, so if we get a shipping "estimate" wrong, ... that's another problem. Just saying ;)
  • rthrashrthrash Member
    That's good info Brett ... thanks for sharing. :)
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