As part of a planned outage to upgrade their services, the Australia Post website (auspost.com.au) will be unavailable for approximately 26 hours from 10pm AEDT on Friday 17 October until midnight AEDT on Saturday 18 October 2014.
This outage affects many Australia Post tools including the Australia Post Postage Calculator built into Spiffy Stores.
To minimise disruption, please plan ahead accordingly. Then check the Australia Post website for updates as the timeframe for the outage may change.
Please do not contact the Australia Post help desk during the outage as they’ll restore the service as quickly as possible. Similarly, there is nothing Spiffy Stores Support can do to remedy the situation other than to provide the instructions that we have provided below…
How to plan for this outage
You will need to make sure that you have backup shipping rates during the outage. Australia Post calculations will not be available during the outage, so your customers may not be able to order at all.
- Firstly, you will need to check whether you are affected. Go to the “Preferences -> Shipping & handling” section of your store’s Toolbox. If you are using Australia Post, it will display there (see image below).
If you’re not using the Australia Post Shipping Carrier, then you don’t need to worry about the outage. - If you are only using the Australia Post Shipping Agent then you will need to make sure you have set a “Default fee” for the shipping rate. To do this, you click on the shipping rate and edit it. Under “Default action”, choose “Use the default fee” and enter your default fee. See example below.
- Once you have done this, save your changes. You will also need to make sure that you do this for any other countries that use the Australia Post shipping carrier.
ADDED @ 2:30pm…
We’ve had a few questions about what price you should set for the default fee. As there’s no substitute for the actual shipping rate, the only think I can suggest is that you have a look at some of your orders and calculate the average shipping cost.
For example;
| # of orders | Shipping cost | Total shipping cost |
|---|---|---|
| 22 | $8.25 | $181.50 |
| 35 | $13.40 | $469.00 |
| 9 | $16.70 | $150.30 |
| Total = 66 orders | Total = $800.80 |
Average shipping cost = $800.80 ÷ 66
which comes to $12.13
You may think that averaging out your shipping is a bad approach, but if the alternative is that you miss out on some orders during the outage, it seems to be the lesser of two evils. Australia Post calculations will not be available during the outage, so your customers may not be able to order at all.