Connecting UPS and FedEx
Live UPS and FedEx rates from your own carrier accounts: where each credential lives, how boxes are sized, and which services buyers see.
The UPS and FedEx connectors quote shipping straight from your own carrier accounts, so buyers see the rates you actually pay, including any negotiated discount. Connect one or both. When either one is your primary shipping provider, every connected direct carrier quotes at checkout and the buyer picks from all of them.
Connections are per application and per environment. Connect your carrier’s test credentials in a non-production environment and your production credentials in Production.
Before you start
Live carrier rates need three things. The Carriers page checks all three and tells you which are still missing:
- Shipping mode App-based. Connecting your first carrier turns this on when shipping was off. If you had set it to BYO or Calculated on purpose, the Carriers page offers a one-click Use carrier rates at checkout instead of changing it for you.
- A ship-from address. The first Connect asks for one when Setup has none; postal code and country are the minimum. Change it any time on Shipping → Setup.
- Item weights. Send
weight(andweightUnit) in each cart line’s metadata. A cart with no weights at all is not sent to the carriers; it falls back to your own rates. See shipping keys for the full list.
Once all three are in place, Preview rates on the same page shows what a buyer at any postal code would be quoted.
UPS
There are two ways to connect UPS. Both quote from your own UPS account.
Sign in with UPS
On the Carriers page, choose ups under Connect new, enter your six-character UPS account number, and click Sign in with UPS. Approve Throttle with your UPS.com login and you land back on the Carriers page, connected. You don’t need a developer app or any keys.
The UPS.com login you approve with must have access to the account number you entered, or quotes fail. If the sign-in ever expires or you revoke it on UPS, the connection shows an error with a Reconnect UPS button; reconnecting keeps the connection’s settings.
Your own UPS developer app
In the UPS Developer Portal, sign in with your UPS.com account and create an app linked to your shipper account. Leave the Callback URL empty. Rating is included automatically on the free tier; you don’t need any of the Premium products. The app page then shows the two keys.
| Connector field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Client ID | The app’s Client ID |
| Client Secret | The app’s Client Secret |
| Shipper account number | Your six-character UPS account number |
Throttle calls UPS’s test host (wwwcie.ups.com) from non-production environments and onlinetools.ups.com from Production.
Negotiated rates come back only if UPS has enabled them on your account. Otherwise UPS returns published rates.
FedEx
In the FedEx Developer Portal, create an API project and select the Rates and Transit Times API. FedEx issues test keys straight away; production keys come after you move the project to production.
| Connector field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| API Key | The project’s API Key |
| Secret Key | The project’s Secret Key |
| Account number | Your nine-digit FedEx account number. Test projects come with a test account number |
Non-production environments call apis-sandbox.fedex.com; Production calls apis.fedex.com. Throttle asks FedEx for your account rate and falls back to the list rate when FedEx returns none.
What Connect checks
Connect asks the carrier for an access token. That proves the key and secret. It does not prove the account number: neither carrier offers a cheap way to check one without quoting a real shipment. A wrong account number shows up at the first quote, as a failed connection with the carrier’s error on the Carriers page. The account number is shown on each connection so you can check it at a glance.
Settings
Each UPS or FedEx connection has a Settings button on the Carriers page.
Services shown at checkout. Only the services you tick are offered, in the order listed. New connections start with:
- UPS: Ground, 2nd Day Air, Next Day Air
- FedEx: Ground, Home Delivery, 2Day, Standard Overnight
FedEx returns Ground for a business address and Home Delivery for a home, so keep both ticked.
Default box and max weight per box. Lines that don’t send their own dimensions are pooled by weight into your default box, filling each box up to the max weight. A 75 lb cart with a 50 lb limit ships as two boxes, 50 lb and 25 lb. New connections use a 12 × 12 × 12 in box and 50 lb.
A line that sends length, width and height in its metadata ships each unit in its own box of that size. Use this for anything big or oddly shaped: carriers bill by dimensional weight, so a bulky item quoted in the default box would be undercharged.
Markup. A percentage or a flat amount added to every rate from that carrier, for packaging or handling. Flat amounts are entered in your currency and applied per shipment, not per box.
Preview rates
Preview rates on the Carriers page quotes a one-line cart to a destination you type: postal code, state, country, an optional company name, and a weight. It runs the same calculation checkout does, with a 100.00 subtotal in your currency, and shows every service that came back with its price and delivery window, plus any warnings or errors exactly as checkout would see them.
Two things follow from that. A preview that falls back to your zones and methods means checkout would too. And a carrier failure during a preview counts against that connection’s health, the same as a failed quote at checkout.
Leave the company name blank to see residential prices; fill it in for commercial.
Offer a manual option next to carrier rates
Some orders should not be priced by a carrier at checkout: freight, local delivery, or anything you quote by hand afterwards. A zone method can be offered after the live carrier rates so the buyer can choose it instead.
- On Shipping → Zones, make sure a zone covers the addresses the option applies to.
- On Shipping → Methods, add a method in that zone. For freight: type Ship, label it the way the buyer should read it, for example Arrange for Freight Pickup, and leave the base rate at 0.
- Turn on Offer alongside carrier rates on that method and save.
At checkout the buyer sees the carrier services first, in the order the carriers returned them, then every opted-in method whose zone, conditions and availability match. The first carrier rate stays selected until the buyer picks something else, so a 0.00 option is never chosen by default while a carrier rate exists.
Every method, switched on or not, is still the fallback buyers see when every carrier fails and your fallback policy is lenient; without the switch, that is the only place a method appears. Preview rates shows the opted-in methods too, after the carrier services.
To charge the freight afterwards, open the order and use Edit items → Add item with the shipping as a priced line. On a captured card order the difference is charged to the customer on file (the order needs a customer; a guest order without one cannot take a price increase); on an order with an open Net-N invoice it is added to the invoice. Tax is recalculated either way.
Residential or commercial
Both carriers charge more to deliver to a home. Throttle quotes an address as commercial when it has a company name and residential otherwise, so a buyer who leaves the company field empty gets the higher, safer price.
When a carrier fails
- One carrier fails, another answers: the buyer sees the rates that came back. The failure is recorded against that connection.
- Every carrier fails: your shipping fallback policy applies. Lenient falls back to your zones and methods; strict stops a final checkout until the carrier is back.
- Five failures in a row mark the connection as errored and email your admins, as with any shipping provider.
Orders of more than 50 boxes are freight and are not sent to the carriers.
Not covered
These connectors quote rates. They do not buy labels, schedule pickups, validate addresses, or quote freight (LTL).
Last updated October 27, 2026