Fast, accurate shipping quotes: our SolidusConf 2019 lightning talk
Matthew just got back from SolidusConf 2019 in Salt Lake City, where the Solidus community met at the Salt Lake City Public Library for two days of talks followed by two days of hacking on Solidus itself.
The talk
Matthew gave a lightning talk on a problem every online store runs into: showing customers accurate shipping costs without slowing down the cart.
The usual approach is to call each carrier’s API whenever a customer needs a quote. That works, but every call adds time to the page, and when a carrier’s API is slow or down, checkout suffers. For one of our longtime e-commerce clients, we took a different approach. We built a shipping quote lookup that pulls UPS and USPS rates from a local database instead of calling out to the carriers. Quotes come back almost instantly in the cart and during checkout, and they still match what the carriers charge.
Giving back
It was also a great week to spend time with the Solidus community. We’ve been contributing fixes to Solidus around shipping and inventory, and we recently started contributing to friendly_shipping, an open source Ruby library for working with shipping carrier APIs. If you missed the conference, the lightning talks video is on YouTube.