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, January 16, 2021, 8:00 p.m. CT
- End time: Sunday, January 17, 2021, 1:00 a.m. 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. In fact, most use real-time rating with no fallback.
The possible 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 it’s 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 though, with this preventative backup in place.
We recommend for customers using International Rating, SmartPost or FedEx Freight, that 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 set up, and you will need an appropriate plan.
For those using our Date & Time feature, 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 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.
For Non-ShipperHQ Customers
We suggest you check with your shipping solution provider and/or eCommerce platform to ensure you are not impacted. If you are impacted though, it is recommended to establish or use backup custom rates for the time period.
As this is overnight for most sites traffic is lighter, and given it is intermittent, hopefully the impact will be minimal. Nonetheless please feel free to reach out 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, please visit the FedEx Web Services Announcements page:
