Integrate Fedex in your Magento store
Hello guys,
In the phase of developing Magento websites we may come to a point where we need to integrate Fedex shipping method in our magento store.
But this may be very irritating sometimes if it doesn’t work as we expected.Here i will discuss some points that are not discussed elsewhere but is very important and pretty common mistakes that we do.
There are few documentation and support on this topic, and most of them doesn’t discuss the problems that occured during this integration. I too had an hair pulling experience while integrating Fedex due to the lack of proper documentation and support.I hope this will not be the case for you.
The main problem you may be facing while integrating fedex is the Fedex shipping method doesn’t shows upĀ during checkout or while getting the shipping qoutes.
Below is the overall steps discussed point wise:
- First thing you need to do is to create a developer account for fedex to get the test credentials. There are many tutorial you can get where there is detail discussion on this topic, you can follow this link.
- There are four thing you get after registering for test credentials and is required they are:
- Access key
- Account Id
- Password
- Meter number
- Enter these values in your Fedex shipping setting tab in your admin panel of your magento store.
- The other things that should be considered is enabling the sandbox mode by selecting Sandbox Mode to Yes and Select the weight to Pounds.
These are the default setup check whether the shipping method appears on the checkout process.If it shows up than believe me you are lucky that it works at first shot.
If it doesn’t shows up don’t worry, now you need to verify other things.
Before proceeding i want to explain the basic process of Fedex. What does actually fedex do to get the shipping rates? While magento collects all the shipping methods, the Fedex module sends some information to the fedex to get back the rates. These information that fedex module sends are
- the keys that i mentioned above
- Shipping origin address i.e the sellers address
- Customer address i.e the address of the customer or the shipping address that customer enters while checkout process.
- This address consist of country code and postcode.
Now by knowing this much of information, you know what things are necessary to get the fedex rates.Most of us are making mistakes is entering the invalid address and some of us even forget to add the shipping origin address in our magento store.
- So check whether the shipping origin address is entered correctly in your admin configuration.
If these are set correctly but you still didn’t see the shipping method than you may have done one mistake while getting the test credential.
If you are trying to use domestic shipping outside United States, for example inside UK i.e your shipping origin address and customer shipping address both are of same coutry outside of US.If this is your case than you have get seperate credential for these case.While getting the credentials you may have to select the countries option where you may have choose US and Global in default. Here you have to select the particular country to get the credentials. For international shipping and domestic inside US selecting US and GlobalĀ is fine.
You may be thinking this is very tedious process but this is only for test purpose, when you move to production environment single credential work for all the cases.So don’t worry about it.
After verifying this check once again you may be good to go.
Hope this will help you understand the process of integrating Fedex with magento. I will discuss on ho to move from test environment to production environment on my next post. So keep following and at last Happy Coding!!