It is convenient for consumers of the ecommerce store to be aware of a delivery date and shipping fees on the stage of adding products to shopping cart. Generally, shipping cost depends on customer's location, distance and characteristics of the package. Thus it is hard to underestimate the exact shipping costs by making calculations based on table values. And the actual shipping fee may significantly differ from the supposed one. That's why many online stores overcharge their clients in order to cover this difference.

Fortunately, many carriers (UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL) provide online shipping quotes for their services. X-Cart supplies you with interface to InterShipper specialized commercial service providing shipping rates and direct interface to several carriers such as UPS, USPS and FedEx (table based). How does the shipping cost estimation work?

When a customer chooses a delivery service, X-Cart automatically sends request to the InterShipper server or directly to the carrier's server, receives a response containing shipping rate value and displays it to the customer.

Advantages of customer's being provided with exact shipping quotes are:

• Avoidance of missed orders/increase sales
• It Empowers online shoppers to choose the shipping method that suits them best
• It Turns shipping into a competitive advantage
• It Increases customer loyalty, satisfaction, and experience
• No additional hardware or software is needed to install and maintain

X-Cart provides you with flexible mechanism to define your custom shipping rules. You can combine real time shipping calculations with manually defined shipping rules, do your own shipping markups over carriers' estimate, etc.