Questions about Ship Manager...
Does the Fedex real-time shipping lookup work satisfactorily, currently? That’s the thing I need the most, by far.
Magento is currently supporting the real-time quotes where it queries FedEx’s servers for rate quotes on shipments based on the item weights in the shopping cart. This works great out of the box and supported by Magento. I am personally still trying verify the accuracy of the rates provided from Magento’s support of real-time rate quotes.
I’m not familiar with Fedex Shipping Manager, although maybe our shipping guy uses it… If you could write a blog post outlining what it is and what it does for us, that would be useful to me and probably lots of others who are either (1) new to all of this, or, like me, (2) removed from details of shipping on a currently non-Magento store.
I’ll also (of course) Google for it, but a Magento-centered explanation, from the p.o.v. of using it with a Megento store, without all of Fedex’s marketing b.s. obscuring the straightforward truth, would be very helpful.
Ship Manager is FedEx’s software used to ship packages out. This is similar to how UPS provides WorldShip for their customers. Ship Manager is a Windows based stand-alone application that you can run on one of your own PCs or possibly a PC provided by FedEx. The software can interface with a thermal label printer and a scale so that you can weigh a package and print a shipping label directly with their software all at once. You can also setup integration with 3rd party software such as Magento in order to pull in all the address information to be used when preparing the shipment.
Basically once the setup is done with Ship Manager to communicate correctly with Magento then you could just place a package on the attached scale, enter the order number, then hit the print button to print the shipping label.
There is also the option of providing the weight from magento so you don’t have to use a scale to weigh a package. It really depends on how your fulfillment operation works.
You also don’t have to use a thermal label printer, you can use a standard laser printer to print shipping labels.
Some fulfillment operations like to package everything up for an order and the last step be scaling the package and printing the shipping labels. Others try to get everything calculated ahead of time and print the shipping labels off along with a pick ticket so that as soon as everything is packaged together they just stick the label on the box and they don’t have to process it at a station.
