This weekend, our partner FedEx has scheduled maintenance that may impact the API rating services for their freight, small package, label and time in transit services. 

When?

• Start time: Saturday, July 18, 2020 at 9:00pm CT
• End time: Sunday, July 19, 2020 at 5:00am CT

Who is Affected?

All merchants/retailers that use FedEx capabilities on any platform (including BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, etc) will be affected, if the platform uses real-time rates. To our awareness most do use real-time rating with no fallback.

The affected FedEx Services are:

• FedEx Small Package (Domestic and International)
• FedEx SmartPost®
• FedEx Freight
• FedEx Time in Transit (Date and Time)
• FedEx Validation
• FedEx Label and Tracking

We expect the interruption to be intermittent, and hopefully minimal on the rating side, this obviously depends on FedEx, but its best to plan for some downtime.

ShipperHQ Customers

In order to mitigate rate disruptions in the checkout and cart ShipperHQ has implemented fallback LIST rates for all customers using FedEx Small Package Domestic US. During the maintenance you may therefore see higher rates if you use negotiated ACCOUNT rates normally. You will NOT see disruption to service.

We recommend for customers using International Rating, SmartPost or FedEx Freight you add a backup carrier if you do not also show other rates in certain scenarios, our recommendation would be a simple custom table rate carrier, just be aware it may impact rules you have setup, and you will need an appropriate plan.

For those using Time in Transit (our Date logic) we will still return rates during this time, but you will not see delivery dates if we cannot source them from FedEx. This will allow the customer to checkout still, but may result in some orders not having dispatch/delivery dates (or estimated days/dates) in place on order. We see no easy way of mitigating that at this time.

Non-ShipperHQ Customers

Suggest you check with your shipping solution provider and/or eCommerce platform to ensure you are not impacted. If you are impacted then as appropriate maybe put in some backup custom rates for the time period.

As this is overnight for most sites traffic is lighter, and given it is intermittent, hopefully impact will be slight. Nonetheless please feel free to come talk to ShipperHQ about how we can help you in the future avoid such issues, of course you should be using us and this is one of the many reasons why! We have large support for FedEx and other carriers, and are ready to consult for your business needs.

Further Information

Bear in mind most outages like this happen without merchants/retailers being aware. ShipperHQ has over 12 years experience of shipping and is working hard to ensure that such outages are as much as possible recovered by alternative strategies such as we have employed here.

We appreciate FedEx for working closely with ShipperHQ so we could implement fallback rates and correctly inform our customers and the wider ecosystem.

To stay informed directly from FedEx, check out the FedEx Web Services Announcements page: