Shipping Setup

["James Bott" <jbott@compuserve.com>]

MiniVend Users:

I am trying to setup shipping in MiniVend (ver 3.11). I have spent about
three weeks on it thus far and I still have not been successful. I hasten to
point out that I am not a computer novice. I have been programming for over
20 years, and I have two college degrees. Setting up shipping should not be
this hard, at least for someone with my background. At this point I'm
thinking that either the MV documentation is missing something (in addition
to being very hard to understand), or MV ver 3.11 has a bug. However, this
conclusion is inconstant with the fact that I don't see a lot of messages
complaining about shipping setup problems in the message archives. So either
no one else has setup two shipping cost tables, or I am the only one that
can't figure out how to setup them up.

I'll skip over all the details of my hair-pulling journey to where I am now.
I am using the custom UPS lookup method. I think I have figured out
everything else, but I cannot seem to get MV to accept any filename other
than "Ground" for the shipping price file. I have even tried giving a copy
the Simple demo "Ground.csv" another name and then setting it up in
catalog.csv, shipping.csv, and the zone file, and I still get an "Internal
Server Error" every time. As long as the file is named "Ground.csv" it works
fine. While trying to setup domestic shipping (for Australia), I finally
gave up and just used "Ground.csv" for the filename. Unfortunately, now I
need to setup international shipping and I cannot do this without being able
to use another filename for international shipping costs.

OK, here is how I have it setup. What is shown is excerpts from each file
except for the intl.csv file which is shown entirely.

catalog.cfg
Database            iair        iair.csv       CSV
Database            intl        intl.csv       CSV

shipping.asc
iair Australia Post Air weight 0 0 c B APO products/intl.csv 2 .01
iair Australia Post Air  0 2000 B Ground [default zip 45]
iair Australia Post Air  2000 99999 e Contact us for shipping rates.

iair.csv
Weight,1,2,3,4
1,3.75,4.75,5.75,6.50
2,3.75,4.75,5.75,6.50
etc.

intl.csv
Dest. ZIP,Ground,iair
AAAA-ZZZZ,2,3
0000-9999,2,3

country.csv
US US iair United States

Note that I have intl.csv setup to handle both Ground and iair and to handle
both alpha and numeric codes in any range. This is only for testing.
Actually, I need to do the lookup by country code, but I am trying to get
the filename issue solved before I attempt to switch to using country code
from postal code.

Anytime I have changed the shipping.asc file I have done a reconfig. I have
also made sure that I uploaded all of them in ASCII format. All the files
except catalog.cfg are located in the /products directory. I have checked to
make sure that all references are in the same letter case.

OK, with the following line in shipping.asc:

iair Australia Post Air  0 2000 B Ground [default zip 45]

using "Ground" as the shipping cost file, it works. When the filename
specification is changed to "iair" like this:

iair Australia Post Air  0 2000 B iair [default zip 45]

It gives the error "Internal Server Error. The server encountered an
internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request."
This error message is not very informative so I am at a loss as to why I
cannot use a different filename. Has anyone been successful in doing this?
Is this a known MV bug? What am I doing wrong? Any ideas?

Has anyone setup for international shipping using the UPS lookup method and
country code as the identifier? Is there a description of how to do this
somewhere (it is not in the Minivend docs--at least in my opinion)?

Are there any documents, tips, etc. available anywhere on the Internet that
were written by third parties? If not, and I can find the answers to my
problems, then I will consider starting one.

Regards,
James Bott
Intellitech
Computer Consulting for Small Business
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jbott