Pos Laju fuel surcharge – breaking business automation AGAIN!
February 25th, 2009 | by Sean |Remember last time I complained about Pos Malaysia making useless, business-breaking changes to their shipping quotation system? They’ve done it again! Lolyco.com depends on shipping quotations from Pos Malaysia’s website to automate its checkout. I wrote an osCommerce shipping module that just sends the weight and destination of an order to Pos’ website, and extracts the shipping price from the page returned. Last time, they changed the URL of their quotation system, but not the quotation system.
Pos Laju Fuel Surcharge
That’s a pretty trivial error for an IT department to make – the effect on any users of the shipping module was that it stopped providing quotes. For an online business, a failure to provide a shipping quote means the checkout is broken – business will be lost. This time they’ve added a comment about a surcharge to the shipping quote page, but not added it into the quote!
There’s no way a program could be expected to look for casual comments about surcharges. I found out about it when Christopher Yeap (thanks Chris!) made a comment on an old news item at lolyco.com. The effect of Pos’ failure to update their quotation system is that the shipping module will be undercharging for shipments. There’s no really good way to deal with what Pos have done – it’s tantamount to sabotage. I’ve added a ‘Random surcharge%’ field to the v0.09 version of the shipping module as a workaround. If anybody can think of a better idea, I’m all ears.
osCommerce Admin panel showing 'Random surcharge' field
It was my son’s birthday today, and he threw curry chicken all over the floor. It was a mess, and took a long time to clean up. But that’s okay. He’s only one year old. What’s Pos Malaysia’s excuse?
Update 16th March
Thanks to Chris Yeap once again, I realise I didn’t… actually… update… the… online… contributions… page… only… my… local… copy… Apologies to anyone who downloaded the old version and wondered where the new Random surcharge% field was. I’m an idiot. It’s there now!
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