How to survive real time shipping rate API outages

The holiday rush is on! And almost as if on queue – USPS rates went down today…

Just this morning, the USPS rate server was down for about 5 hours. How did your store measure up? If you use the built-in Miva Merchant 5 USPS module, you’re checkout probably looked like this, and you didn’t make any sales:

Runtime error in mm5/5.00/modules/shipping/mvusps.mvc @ [0000002b:00000116]: modules/shipping/mvusps.mv: Line 1468: MvCALL: Unable to open URL

Oops.

Viking’s Shipping Modules + Copernicus Shipping SuperMod = Smart Thinking
If you planned ahead for the possibility – no the inevitability – that USPS, UPS or even FedEx rate servers would be down at some point during the holidays, then you have our Advanced shipping modules AND the Copernicus Shipping SuperMod. Your aftermarket shipping modules were the hero in this time of need – and your store just kept going. You made sales instead of losing money.

If not, the NOW is the time to get the Viking advanced shipping modules AND the Shipping SuperMod.

Unlike the Miva supplied USPS shipping module, Viking’s USPS Advanced can gracefully handle times when the USPS rate server is down.* And the Copernicus Shipping SuperMod lets you configure “fallback” shipping rates that only appear when online rate servers are down and no other shipping methods are available in your store.

Be Prepared. The holiday rush is coming!

*Note: Graceful timeout requires a well configured Miva Merchant hosting environment. Please make sure to ask your host to set your “call timeout” to something reasonable like 15 or 20 seconds.

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