USPS integration

[4erika]

I have no idea what I'm doing here. Is integrating USPS real time shipping charges something that Average Jane can do, or should I just give up now? I registered, got a user id, plugged it into the "configure usps" thingie. But that's all I've done and when I go to the shopping cart of my site, I get a message saying, "USPS Shipping: (USPS) Authorization failure. You are not authorized to connect to this server. " So are there some other tricky things that I'm supposed to do to make this work? Why do they give me a password, but then don't seem to ask for the password anywhere?

What exactly does the USPS thing do? I thought I would just have to estimate how much shipping would cost for various package weights (I'm shipping by weight) and create a chart. But if I do that, it looks like I have to create a chart for each different country? We ship all over the world. So it looks like the USPS thing would do all those calculations for me based on the shipping information that the customer puts in. Is that true?

I am beyond confused about the whole shipping thing and it's the most important part of the website. I've looked at the help sections of the shopsite software, the usps website, and I've searched the forum and still can't figure it out. The USPS site says to hire someone, which makes me think I should just give up.

[Jim]

You need to request that USPS enable your account. The email that you received from USPS probably states that you need to do some testing and then notify them of the results and ask for your account to be turned on. ShopSite has done the testing so you don't need to do that part, but you must still let USPS know that you need your account activated.