≡ Menu

Fedex Vs. UPS

I don\’t know why I\’m talking about this topic. It seems rather lame, but I thought I would give a run at it today.

Shipping rates are overly difficult to calculate. They depend on destination, weight, sometimes size of box, sometimes contents of box. For this reason, I have never tried to do it by hand. I\’ve always used a computer.

That\’s all fine and dandy, but now, imagine your building a website and you need to be able to calculate these rates realtime. Fun… And honestly, both FEDEX and UPS give you tools to do this.

Now personally, I\’m a bigger fan of Fedex, mainly because their tracking system is a little more user friendly. However, UPS has never really given me any issues, other than I hate their tracking system. But what\’s surprising is how different their backends are for people who run websites. And in that battle, UPS wins hands down.

UPS using a simple post and get request, similiar to what fedex does, but all you have to do is register and your done. It doesn\’t allow you to place packages in the system, or anything of that nature… Just allows you to get rates. I\’m sure they have a system for putting items into the UPS system, but I don\’t need to do that… I just need to get rates.

Fedex however, has the whole system all in one. Meaning, I have to deal with the code to handle creating and shipping a package if I want to get rates. I also have to get \"approved\" by Fedex (which I think I might have accidently found a way around). Either way, They also aren\’t using a form of XML that I like to read.

That all said, I like simple. I like clean. Why can\’t Fedex have UPS\’s backend. Why can\’t UPS have fedex\’s front end. I tell ya… I\’ll just wait til Google gets in the package tracking and delivery business (and you bet they will, google maps, wanting to be able to track and record the movement of everything on earth… I tell ya).

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • ajmicek March 31, 2006, 2:53 pm

    justin – i\’m using around 1.9 gigs of bandwidth a month. seems like a lot to me; let me know if that needs to be cut back.

    vis a vis this post: i think UPS should go back to its old logo.

  • simland April 2, 2006, 1:52 am

    Shout out to DHL, don\’t discrimate against the non-american shippers.

Next post:

Previous post: