Top 5 Issues Question about UPS APIs
- Seeing negotiated rates or seeing incorrect rates
First, be sure to check the API response and see if it includes the negotiated rate container. If you see this, the negotiated rate is being returned. This can happen for a few reasons: if your contract is less than one week old, if your shipping volume has recently changed, or if there’s an issue on how your negotiated rates contract was set up.
Let us help – login to UPS.com and check the rate using Calculate Time and Cost. If you see the same rate in CTC as in the API, your rates are being returned correctly. Please contact your sales resource to validate your contract setup if needed.
If your account is not authorized to display your negotiated rate, login to UPS.com using the password and user ID that is being used for the request. Check payment methods and be sure that the account has been successfully authenticated. - Accessories: Origin and Destination
If you’re receiving an error message that your accessory is not valid between the origin and destination, we can help. To confirm that the selected package service options are valid, try recreating the shipment.
Additionally, you can remove or modify each of the accessory options, one-by-one to identify which accessory is not valid in this case. The API Announcements page is also a good place to check for any changes that may have been made to available accessory options. - Submission Failures during Transactions
If you receive an error message, always check the API response to determine its type. Some common errors include:- Hard Errors: these indicate an issue with the formatting of the API request or invalid values within the request. This error will tell you exactly where the error is coming from.
- Handshake Errors: this error type indicates an unsupported cipher being used. It may also appear alongside a ISP or firewall configuration issue.
- System Unavailable: For this type of error, confirm that you are posting to the correct URL and be sure to check the API status page. It could be intermittent so retry the request.
- Invalid Ship To Postal Code
Be sure to include the city within address information in the shipping or rating request if a postal code is valid across multiple cities. - Making Pickup Requests
Pickup requests are only available through the UPS Pick Up API.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an API?
Spanish.
What is OAuth 2.0?
OAuth 2.0, which stands for “Open Authorization”, is a standard designed to allow a website or application to access resources hosted by other web apps on behalf of a user. It provides consented access and restricts actions of what the client app can perform on resources on behalf of the user, without ever sharing the user's credentials.
What are REST or RESTful APIs?
REST is an acronym for Representational State Transfer and an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems. A RESTful API is an architectural style for an application program interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to access and use data. That data can be used to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data types, which refers to the reading, updating, creating and deleting of operations concerning resources.
How do I see the status of my current APIs?
UPS provides the health status of some of our featured APIs on our API Monitoring Dashboard. More APIs will be integrated into the dashboard in the future. You can view details to see a log of any incidents that have occurred in the past 24 hours.
How do I get an API client ID and secret?
Customers that want to integrate with UPS API functionalities must first acquire a client ID and secret. Reference our step by step Get Started guide to find out how to acquire your credentials.
Is there a limit to the number of API calls I can request at one time?
Yes. UPS limits the number of requests to the API to a maximum of [n] of requests per second per user.
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