Beacon Shipping Rates for UPS

UPS retired its old access-key APIs and moved to OAuth. Beacon Shipping Rates for UPS is built for the new UPS API from the start, with the things store owners kept asking for: a setup that doesn’t take an afternoon, rates that don’t vanish when UPS has a bad hour, and delivery dates on the checkout page.

What you get, free:

• Live UPS rates at checkout for Ground, 3 Day Select, 2nd Day Air, 2nd Day Air A.M., Next Day Air Saver, Next Day Air and Next Day Air Early, plus UPS Standard, Worldwide Expedited, Worldwide Saver, Worldwide Express and Express Plus for international orders.
• Transit time on every rate — “UPS Ground · arrives Tue, Sep 30” or “(3 business days)”, from UPS’s own time-in-transit data, in the same call as the price.
• Negotiated rates when you have them: add your account number and tick a box.
• A guided setup page (WooCommerce → UPS Rates) that walks you through the UPS Developer Portal step by step, tests the connection and fetches a real rate before you touch a shipping zone. Every UPS error is translated into what to actually do.
• Rates that survive outages and spikes. Identical shipments are served from cache, the plugin stops calling UPS above a ceiling you set, and a stale copy is kept for a week for when UPS is down.
• A fallback rate so a UPS outage never shows customers an empty shipping list.
• Sane packing: one box per order, per product line or per item, rated together as one UPS shipment, with automatic unit conversion and the 150 lb limit respected.
• Residential surcharge handling, handling markup (fixed or percent), custom method title.
• Works with shipping zones, the block cart and checkout, and High-Performance Order Storage. Uninstalls clean.

You use your own UPS API keys — nothing is proxied through anyone’s server and there is no per-request fee.

Beacon Shipping Rates for UPS is an independent plugin by Beacon Events. It is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by United Parcel Service of America, Inc. UPS, the UPS brandmark and the UPS service names are trademarks of United Parcel Service of America, Inc.

External services

This plugin connects to the UPS APIs (operated by United Parcel Service) to get shipping rates and transit times. It is needed to show live UPS prices at checkout.

• When: when a customer’s cart needs a shipping quote at cart or checkout (unless a cached rate is used), and when a store admin clicks “Test connection” or “Get rates” on the setup page.
• What is sent: to https://onlinetools.ups.com/security/v1/oauth/token — the store’s own UPS Client ID and Secret (and account number, if set), to obtain an access token. To https://onlinetools.ups.com/api/rating/v2409/Shoptimeintransit — the origin postcode and country, the destination postcode, country, state and city, whether the address is residential, the ship date, package weights and dimensions, and (for international orders) the order value for customs. No customer names, street addresses, emails or order details are sent.
• If the “UPS test environment” option is enabled, the same requests go to https://wwwcie.ups.com instead.
• UPS Technology Agreement (API terms): https://www.ups.com/assets/resources/media/en_US/GTC.pdf
• UPS privacy notice: https://www.ups.com/us/en/support/shipping-support/legal-terms-conditions/privacy-notice