Shipping quote world map update
January 28th, 2011 | by Sean |
Old world map - a lot of red
Adding Laos (article soon) to the shipping origins in the spider.my data meant I had to update a few things at spider.my – among them the shipping world map. The old shades of red were looking a bit dull, so I used java.awt.Color’s HSVtoRGB() method to map shipping prices onto a range of hues.
The map is very useful for quickly showing if some rates are missing when I update a shipping method. It’s obvious from the Laos Entreprise des Postes Lao EMS map that I’ve only included countries they’ve explicitly listed on the rear of the sheet I got from them in Vientiane.
New colours - Pos Malaysia Air Parcel 6kg
Less clear is the fact that the Vietnam rates were missing from the Pos Air Parcel map. It’s easier to see in the large version linked from the thumbnail at right. The technique I use for updating the shipping rates uses the specified “Maximum weight” from Pos’ website. For Vietnam (I think it’s only that one) their rates calculator gives a maximum weight of 20kg for Air Parcel, but then only gives prices up to 10kg! A little bit of defensive coding now copes with that particular oddity, and spider.my will give quotes for Vietnam (they were missing due to my code failing with an error for Vietnam).
I’ve retained the ‘gamboge’ colouring for rejected shipping quotations. You can see in the large Pos Malaysia Air Parcel 6kg map that Nepal is coloured gamboge: Pos Malaysia’s Maximum Weight for Air Parcel to Nepal is 5kg.
Laos Post EMS 0.5kg - zone pricing obvious
I think the new price spectrum makes it a little more obvious where the expensive shipping destinations are. Let me know what you think. If you really need a gigantic version of one of the shipping world maps – for a teeshirt, tea towel, duvet cover, mouse mat, whatever – let me know and I’ll send you the intermediate SVG file so you can print it as large as you like.
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