Fedex 2 Day Shipping always costs $11.83 issue

Discovered a really bothersome issue with fedex, for random zip codes all over the US it returns the same shipping rate of $11.83 for  FEDEX_2_DAY shipping. These zip codes were talking about random places like South Dakota, Colorado, Arizona to name a few.

If you have Fedex shipping, you may want to start watching the calculations on the 2 Day shipping. I am still not totally convinced that its not only just an issue with this particular fedex production account. I have sent support a request, and will update this post with the findings.

To confirm that the issue was not just code in joomla/virtuemart I downloaded and setup the Fedex example api code and ran tests with versions 9,10, & 13 all in production.


Here is the link to the Fedex Developer resources and api
https://www.fedex.com/wpor/web/jsp/drclinks.jsp?links=wss/getstarted.html

There is a link on this page for the "Web Services Developer Guide" but its really hard to see/find due to its styling, so here is that link too.

FedEx Handling fee as a percent in virtuemart

If your like me, and every client needs something special and different. One of my latest e-commerce stores used FedEx for shipping. Great, no problem its an easy setup in Virtuemart. Their FedEx account gives them special pricing for the online shipping calculator, which they need to add 40% too. Virtuemart doesn't allow you to add a percent only a set integer amount.

The handling fee variable in virtuemart is setup only to add a base amount to the shipping cost. We needed to add 40% to each shipping amount.

This is a change specifically for FedEx, but the other shippers should be similar.

Change the handling fee in the FedEx preferences to 0.40.

components/com_virtuemart/classes/shipping/fedex.php: around line 206
change & add the lines below.

//add the percent or set amount 
if(FEDEX_HANDLINGFEE < 1)
     $charge =$rate_Ret['1419-'.$i]+ $rate_Ret['1419-'.$i] * floatval( FEDEX_HANDLINGFEE );
    else
     $charge = $rate_Ret['1419-'.$i] + floatval( FEDEX_HANDLINGFEE );