Chances are, the more successful your online store is, the more control you'll want to exercise over your shipping costs and charges. Where physical goods are concerned, the more the store sells, the higher the shipping bills—and if you can deliver a more cost effective way of passing on shipping charges to the customers for your clients, you're golden.

In a previous Dreamweaver Developer Center article, Adding database-driven shipping charge functionality to an online store, I explored a developer-initiated method for setting your shipping charges within Dreamweaver. The following article discusses the process of getting shipping quotes from the major shipping companies in real time by taking advantage of the web services from UPS and FedEx.

As noted in the previous articles, the majority of shopping cart extensions for Dreamweaver support shipping charges in one way or another. Cartweaver, for example, uses a variation on the database-driven shipping method. WebAssist eCart, on the other hand, supports the database-driven technique and recently added the ability to retrieve real-time quotes in the recently released version.

Requirements

To make the most of this tutorial you will need to install the following software:

Dreamweaver CS4

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisite knowledge

Basic understanding of the building blocks and tools required for building dynamnic websites.

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