Integrating Custom Shipping Methods – BigPost into Magento
One of our long-standing Australian clients, with whom we developed a Magento eCommerce site and integrated with NetSuite, had a custom requirement in handling their freight manager. The client required us to integrate a third-party freight delivery system manager (Big Post) with the Magento website in order to provide a seamless order gateway for the end-user.
Big Post, as you know, is a delivery partner in Australia with 100+ collection depots capable of handling small and large cargo.
Overview
The BigPost-Magento integration primarily focusses on the freight cost calucaltion based on geographical location and integrating it with the Magento website. Our developers started working with an API provided by the BigPost team to integrate it with the client website.
Requirements
Before the integration, our client had difficulty ascertaining the actual cost of each order as they are dependent on the locality or region. Since the transportation prices vary, they required a dynamic system that calculates the total price for each order.
The idea behind integrating the cost calculation/ delivery partner (BigPost) with the client’s Magento website was that the end-users of the client website will be able to view the price in real-time as they enter their shipping details.
Solution
Our Magento team and integration development experts had reviewed the requirement and initiated the development with the API from BigPost. One of the challenges was overcoming the hindrance of meeting the default parameters of both these independent platforms. However, our Magento developers were finally able to pass the details that the user entered in the Magento Website to the BigPost website and fetch it back without any hassles, and display the order sum to the end-user seamlessly.
Result
The integration was successful and the cost data retrieval from the third-party website (BigPost) now works effortlessly in Magento. End-users of the website can now check the price of the items in real-time based on their location. This is a custom shipping integration in Magento that helped our client resolve the challenge of static data fields that had trouble.
