Pos Malaysia shipping rates download
February 25th, 2010 | by Sean |
Download Pos Malaysia shipping rates at spider.my
Update January 2011 – there won’t be any rates download for some time. If you’re looking for a shipping module for osCommerce / Zen Cart try this article. If you’re looking for simplified access to Pos Malaysia’s shipping rates, you could use the spider.my API here.
Nearly there! Yesterday’s marathon session to rip Pos Malaysia‘s rating data and make it persistent on spider.my made today’s job a little bit easier. The first part of the API is done: there’s a minimal interface for obtaining a single shipping quotation. Today sees the second part complete: a method for obtaining a complete set of rating data for a 3rd-party application.
If you visit part 3 of my Pos Malaysia API demo, you can now select country and shipping method (or all of one, or all of both), and the page will give you a link from which you can download a full set of rates in XML format. There is just one little wrinkle, and that is that I’m using unchanged data from Pos Malaysia. On some of their (less-popular, I’m guessing) destinations, they claim to deliver parcels up to 999kg! I store the shipping data as a table of prices against all the different weights for a shipping method, so with 0.5kg divisions, I end up with 2,000 entries for some methods. My storage method is quite efficient, so it’s not a problem on the server, but if you request All Countries + All Methods, the XML data file is several MB in size.
For an example of one of the smaller data files, see this XML file containing the data for Pos Laju Document and Parcel deliveries to the UK:
http://spider.my/pos-malaysia-rates-3/-ANY–to-United%20Kingdom.xml
See? That’s a very simple format, easily incorporated into your current application. There are just a couple of little things I’d like to do in the way of demonstrations, and then I’ll try to find someone at Pos who might be interested in providing an API to local e-businesses.
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