Postage
Overview
A Postage represents a single postage option attached to a Listing.
If you do not plan to create different postage costs for different Listings, we recommend that when creating or updating Listings through the API, that you leave the postage field blank. This will result in your Listing being assigned your default postage costs and options, which can be set from the Members Area > Selling > Seller Tools > Default Listing Settings page.
Combining Shipping
On Hip eCommerce, when an item is purchased, the cost to ship the item is represented by the price in the Postage resource. If a buyer purchases multiple items from a Seller in a single Sale (Order), the highest price for any of the applicable Postage resources will be used for the attached Listing. All other Listings will be charged the price_addl rate instead (the cost to ship the item as an additional item in a Sale (Order)).
If there is a specific item which you do not wish to offer combined shipping on, simply set the price and price_addl to the same rate. However, please keep in mind that Hip eCommerce requires all shipping settings to be reasonable and not excessive.
Table Rate Shipping per Number of Items
The price_addl field can be used to set-up table rate shipping per number of items in a Sale (Order). This is set-up as follows (for example) 3.00/5 where 3.00 would only be added after every 5th additional item in the Sale (Order).
Fields
Field
| Visibility
| Type
| Description
|
price
| public
| int
| The cost to ship the item by itself.
|
price_addl
| public
| int or string
| The cost to ship the item as an additional item in a Sale (Order).
|
method
| public
| string | The method of shipment (for example: First Class Mail)
|
type | public | enum(item,carriers) | Optional. If set, will override the Account-Based Postage Calculation Type. Please see Notes on Type below. |
location_groups
| public
| array(string)
| The location groups which this postage option is applicable to. Please see Notes on Location Groups below.
|
location_countries
| public
| array(int)
| A list of Country IDs (see HipStamp IDs, HipPostcard IDs or HipComic IDs). which this postage option is applicable to. Automatically generated from location_groups, and only included in returned data - can not be set when creating/updating Listings (only set location_groups). |
Notes on Location Groups
The default Location Groups available to all Users are "Domestic" and "Everywhere Else", which represent the Seller's home country, and all other countries respectively. However, please note that Sellers can customize their Location Groups. This can be something as simple as adding a new Location Group named "Europe" which covers all Europe countries. However, Sellers can entirely remove the Location Groups "Domestic" and "Everywhere Else", and create new Location Groups with completely different names. This is of significant importance within the Hip eCommerce API, because all Listings are required to have at least one valid Postage resource attached, which must be attached to a specific Location Group. If the name of the Location Group does not exist within the Seller's Location Groups, the Postage resource will be invalid.
To avoid such issues, you can periodically check what Location Groups are available to the current Seller through the
getLocationGroups method.
Note: Sellers can customize their Location Groups from the Members Area > Selling > Seller Tools > Postage Setup page.
Notes on Type
If Type is set, this will override the Account-Based Postage Calculate Type. item represents standard item based shipping, in which the price, price_addl, and method fields will be used to determine the cost to ship an item. carriers represent calculated shipping, in which the cost to ship an item will automatically be calculated based on carrier rates. Which carriers you enable, such as the USPS, UPS or FedEx can be updated from the Members Area > Selling > Seller Tools > Postage Setup page.
Note that when setting type to carriers, price, price_addl, and method is optional, and if set, will be ignored. Additionally, please note that if you create a new listing which uses the type carriers, and you do not currently have any carriers enabled from the Postage Setup page, one will be enabled for you by default.
Associations
This resource has no associations.
Methods
This resource has no methods.
Examples
When sending data:
{
"price": 1,
"price_addl": 1,
"method": "First Class Standard",
"location_groups": [
"Domestic"
]
}
When sending data as an array ("postage") or type Postage, for example when creating a Listing:
"postage": [
{
"price": 1,
"price_addl": 1,
"method": "First Class Standard",
"location_groups": [
"Domestic"
]
},
{
"price": 2.5,
"price_addl": 2.5,
"method": "Airmail International",
"location_groups": [
"Everywhere Else"
]
]