USPS not showing up on our site.

[newguyintown]

Hello -

Just jumped through the necessary hoops to verify the correct User ID's and production URL for our two sites. Problem is that once a customer gets to the shipping selection during purchase, there are no options for USPS available. We also offer UPS, and that shows up fine, but not the USPS options.

Any suggestions?

[dotCOM_host]

Hello -

Just jumped through the necessary hoops to verify the correct User ID's and production URL for our two sites. Problem is that once a customer gets to the shipping selection during purchase, there are no options for USPS available. We also offer UPS, and that shows up fine, but not the USPS options.

Any suggestions?
Did you call USPS to activate your account? By default it's in test mode, and will not show any options or do much of anything else... You have to call them to activate your account with them before USPS starts working.

[newguyintown]

Yes - did that via four really unhelpful emails from USPS. I am told that our accounts are active and should be working just fine. Except....they're not. Not a single USPS option shows up when a customer gets to that point on our sites.

[dotCOM_host]

Hmmm. If it's a site we host - feel free to open a support ticket with us and we'll take a look.

[newguyintown]

It is, Remik.

Support ticket coming your way. . .

[fH_noob]

Just curious, I'm having the same problem. Do you mind sharing the solution to this? USPS is active, but no options at POS. Thanks in advance for your help.

[newguyintown]

Remik's advice of
Did you call USPS to activate your account? By default it's in test mode, and will not show any options or do much of anything else... You have to call them to activate your account with them before USPS starts working.
is what did it for me. The accounts we had were in test mode even after I ran all the tests I was told to by USPS and requested that my account be moved to the production server. They are a pain to deal with, but you just have to demand you be moved to the production server and verify that your URL and ID are correct.

Plus, it did take a couple days after we were moved to the production server for USPS options to show up on our site.

[fH_noob]

Ah. Thanks for the heads up. They actually insulted my client's intelligence when she asked them a question about this!

I just spoke w/ Jim in Miva Support and he mentioned that I'm missing a necessary patch. Hopefully all will be well when we install it on Monday.

[VikingCoders]

FYI: we've had a couple of cases recently of USPS getting confused and assigning people IDs for their address verification service instead of the rate service. The ID therefore fails when used in a shipping module. (I don't recall the exact message but the log file created by our USPS Advanced module revealed the issue.) Sometimes it's easier to just create a new ID with them.

[fH_noob]

Good to know. Thanks for the insight, Bret. I may just convince them to go w/ UPS or another carrier if we keep having trouble ;)

[wcw]

The email I got from usps said, "When you have completed your testing, email the USPS Internet Customer Care Center (ICCC). They will switch your profile to allow you access to the production server and will provide you with the production URLs."

What testing? I inserted the ID they sent me. I even changed the url to the testing url. I went to checkout and it showed nothing for usps. So what kind of test is that? It did not do anything but then there were no errors either. So I emailed them to switch me to the production server. They never emailed me back. I switch the url in the module's admin to the production server url but still no usps methods. What a PIA. Anybody know what the next step is? Did I miss something related to testing?

[Viking Coders]

Their test server only works for a particular set of conditions, mentioned in their development documentation..so it's pretty much useless for all but pure development purposes. However they still force everyone to pretend that they tested rather than assigning them a valid id from the outset.

You can also call them but the issue is almost certainly that your id isn't updated for production.

[wcw]

Another example of a government agency gone awry.