1. Chapter 12 Letting Customer Track Their Orders Objectives  Enabling customer track their own orders.  Calculating Shipping Costs

2. Enabling Customers track their orders Has two major benefits: 1. Lowers customer service costs. 2. Draws customers back to your Web site.

3. Calculating Shipping Cost  iisCARTship component enables you to calculate the cost of shipping a package and enables to display the information in an ASP page.  iisCART ship component automatically query each of the major shipping companies-United Parcel Service, Federal Express & United States Postal service and display the cost of shipping the order with each company.  Advantage is, it retrieves latest rate information from each shipping company.

4. Installing the iisCARTship Component  Not included with ASP.  Commercial component that you must download and buy.  Purchase at: http://www.iiscart.com.http://www.iiscart.com  First Download & unzipped it & than install.  Before it is used in ASP, add information about the component to your computer registry.  The component is bundled with two scripts that will automatically add the correct registry information.

5. Contd….  The component with the PWS running on Win 95 or 98, will need to execute the script named win9x.bat.  The component with IIS running on Win NT or Win 2000, execute the script named winNT.bat.  At last the dialog box should pop up reporting that the DLLs were successfully installed.

6. iisCARTship Properties and Methods  To use iisCARTship component the following three steps must be complete: –Create an instance of the component. –Set certain required properties of the component such as the postal code for the origin and destination of the package. –Query the shipping companies.

7.  To create the instance of the iisCARTship component: –Set myShip=Server.createObject(“iiscartship.ship”)  Before the component is used to query the shipping companies set the following properties: –OrigPostal-Postal code of the sender of the package. –DestPostal-The postal code the recipient of the package. –Weight-the weight of the package. –DestCountry-The Cuntory code of the destination of the package.

8.  For Federal Express, there are two additional required properties:  FDXPack-The type of packaging used for the shipment. (Five values are Letter, Pak, Box, Tube)  FDXPick-The property indicates whether the package will be dropped off by you or picked up by Federal Express. (Three values will be drop-off, at my location or will request a courier pickup.

9. Methods  After the properties are set, you can query the shipping companies by calling the ShipCalc() Method.  It returns the collection named ShipInfo collection. Each item in this collection has the has the following properties:  cError-Service specific error.  cSingleService-The name of the service being offered.  CshipCompany-The name of the company providing the service.

10.  ctotalCharge -Total cost to ship the package.  cBaseCharge-Base charge to ship the package.  cAddCharge-Any additional charge to ship the package.  cShipTime-When the package is guaranteed to arrive.  LimitServices() Method: to display information for only particular services.  CountaryList() method: To generate an HTML combo box that contains a list of valid country codes.