Sean's blog

osCommerce shipping module for spider.my (Pos Malaysia rates) pre-release

The shipping quote API and shipping modules for osCommerce and Zen Cart is now at Shipping-Quote.net

If you’ve been caught out by Pos Malaysia’s recent site updates and now can’t quote for international deliveries from your shop, this module is functional at one Malaysian online shop. Pos Malaysia’s update has come while I’ve been re-vamping the shipping quotation back-end and so I only have Pos Malaysia Air Parcel and Surface Parcel rates online as of 17th Jan 2011.

Spider.my shipping module admin

You can download the new osCommerce shipping module from spider.my. It is only hours old, so may well have some ‘quirks’. It’s a significant improvement over no shipping calculations at all, so give it a spin and I’ll do my best to attend quickly to any problems you find in the module.

The config is all fairly obvious. It’ll only quote at the moment (until I rip some more rates) for ‘Pos Air Parcel’ and ‘Pos Surface Parcel’ for overseas destinations. You probably don’t want Pos Surface Parcel (it has very long delivery times, but it is cheap), so in the ‘Postal Methods’ field in admin section for shipping module, enter ‘Pos Air Parcel’, and you’ll only get Pos Air Parcel quotes from spider.my.

There are a couple of obvious candidates for system-wide setttings, but some doubt over the standardisation of osCommerce settings convinced me it would be safer to add them to the module settings. Weight units – I don’t recall seeing an osCommerce setting for this, so specify it here. Spider.my will quote for several different units, including kg, g (or gm) lb, oz etc.

‘Ship from’ location – the spider.my quotation API relies on valid ISO 3166-1 country and ISO 3166-2 subdivision location codes. Here’s the ISO 3166-2 list for Malaysia (MY).

Handling Fee is handy if you want to add a fixed fee for packaging, standing in the queue at Pos Malaysia’s counter etc. It may need some refining, as the same fee may not be appropriate for shipping by Pos Laju when they come to your house to pickup, but is appropriate to cover the effort of driving to your local office and waiting in the queue.

Postal Methods can be used to restrict which methods are quoted. For example as I write this there are only 2 full sets of international rates online: Pos Surface Parcel and Pos Air Parcel. If you don’t want to quote Pos Surface Parcel (it’s very cheap, but very slow), you can enter ‘Pos Air Parcel’ (as shown in the image) and only Pos Air Parcel quotes will be shown.

Update 18th Jan 2011, 2am MYT: I haven’t been updating the version from 0 of the shipping module while I’ve been hacking from the back-end to the front to get it quoting for local (ISO 3166-2) shipments. The version last modified at 01:54am is the first one which works reliably for both local (in-Malaysia) shipping and international.

There are some non-trivial changes to your osCommerce database (a new column on the zones table) needed to support local deliveries, I’ll write an article about that tomorrow. Today… but later when I wake up.

It’s tomorrow now and that first version has a fatal bug if it’s used without the table changes. I’ve updated the zipfile to a v0.1 with a workaround for an un-modified table. Just delete the region code (the ‘MY-05’ in the image above) from the admin page, and the module won’t attempt to fetch data from a column that doesn’t exist.

Update – hopefully the last for a while: squashed a few bugs with multi-method quotes. The shipping module myspider v0.2 is available for osCommerce as oscommerce_myspider.zip and as v0.1 for Zen Cart as zencart_myspider.zip