I wrote about building an Ecometry Shipping Station on your own over a year ago. A few people have tried building one on their own using this guide, which is great. So I decided when I was going to build two more when we integrated UPS and were given some new Dell computers as part of a UPS subsidy (which was really cool), that I should share my experience again.

Everything worked pretty straightforward like last time, save for that the new computers don’t have PS2 ports, just USB. So our older scanners no longer work with new hardware. The configuration is as follows:

• Dell Optiplex 740 Desktop
• Zebra S4M Direct Thermal Printer
• Mettler Toledo PS60 Scale
• Symbol LS2208 Barcode Scanner

I still had to change the settings on the COM1 port to work with the scale. The settings can be found in my original post here. I also had to set the scale’s protocol to Mettler Toledo, which you can easily do following the instructions that come on the CD with the scale. Thanks to Chuck on the Ecometry Google Group for that tip. You’ll also want to be sure the baud rate and stop bits settings on the scale match up with what you set on the COM port.

The Zebra S4M printer will work just fine with UPS provided labels. If you don’t have those, get direct thermal labels. You don’t need a ribbon (and the printer isn’t configured for one from UPS anyway). Ecometry will tell you that all that works is the Z4M printers, but the S4M printer will work just fine. This is great because it costs about half as much as a Z4M.

And remember, there are no PS2 ports on these newer computer so there’s no support for older scanners, such as the PSC Powerscan PSSR-0000 or PSSR-1000. These just aren’t compatible with USB. You could perhaps get this to work with a PCI add in card such as this one and some AT to PS2 converters, but I didn’t want to spend a bunch of extra money to just hack the thing together. It seemed to be a better idea to just get all new hardware for these.

We’ve been using these new stations for a few days now and they’re working great. Feel free to drop me a line about building these. You can definitely save yourself a bunch of money building these on your own instead of going through Ecometry’s provider, Agilysys.

We recently wanted to get a better handle on shipping packages for YumDrop via USPS. Ecometry has support for USPS, but only using what they call an Indicia Permit stamp. The problem with this is the minimums the USPS requires you to meet in order to use this. You have to ship at least 50lbs or 200 pieces to even qualify to ship this way. You also have to go through a lengthy verification process and drop the packages off yourself. Not ideal.

So some reps from USPS came down to visit and suggested we use Endicia to ship via USPS. Its a low cost, easy to use solution. It’s a monthly subscription program starting at $9.95 and topping out at $34.95 per month. There are no meters to rent and it can run on any computer. All of the software is included with the monthly fee.

Cool! Next step, Ecometry integration. Well, no surprise, there isn’t one from Ecometry directly. So I called our USPS rep and talked to him about solutions. He said he’d call Endicia and see what we could do. Turns out Endicia has an import/export product called Endicia Galaxy that can pull data into Endicia and push it back out to Ecometry. Even better, you can use a bar code scanner to basically scan the barcode on a collate and it will auto-populate the shipping address fields in the Endicia DAZzle postage printing software.

It all basically works through and ODBC connection that you set up as part of the Endicia Galaxy installation program. Galaxy can pull the order and shipment information straight from Ecometry when you scan the package so that it can print the label automatically for you. Really cool!

The one gotcha here is that Galaxy can’t read from multiple tables, which is how Ecometry stores its data. What you can do is set up a SQL View to pull the data from. I found this document in the Ecometry Google Group thread on how to set this stuff up. It’s from Scott Lohmann of republicoftea.com, so I want to give him credit there. You can basically follow this to the T, however…

I did encounter one problem. Scott’s example view SQL code only pulls information from the CUSTOMER’s table. The issue here is if your order has a different ship-to address than bill-to address, then the wrong address gets printed on the label. Laura Smith from swell.com pointed me in the right direction. After you ship confirm a package, it will show up in the MANIFESTENTRIES table. In here will be all of the information regarding the package and where its going. So you can pull the information right from there! You can download a copy of the SQL code for this view here.

Now I’m left with a couple of issues to sort out. First, I want to post the actual shipping cost and any tracking information back to Ecometry. I think you can do this through a SQL view as well, I just haven’t figured it out. Also, it looks like ESM keeps a connection to the shipping scale open, so Galaxy can’t pull the package weight in directly. I have to enter it manually. And lastly, when you scan the package barcode, you have to remove the last digit. Its not part of the order number, but some flag Ecometry puts on the end there. A little annoying, but workable.

All in all, I’d say this works great. Way better than doing it by hand through usps.com or printing postage from a postage meter. You can just generate the labels as you ship confirm packages.

Setting up Ecometry shipping methods is something that trips me up every time I have to do it. Honestly, I think the problem is that there are just too many steps that aren’t clear enough. If you miss one thing, you’re hosed. Too bad Ecometry can’t (or isn’t able to) fix this obvious usability issue for whatever reason. They have more documentation than they used to via their support portal, but it still isn’t as good as it could be (it looks like a glorified README and not indexed by Google, thus not avaiable on the world wide web, where information belongs).

So I’m going to do the best thing I can, and go over exactly how to do it here. This way I will have it documented and anyone else out there in Ecometry land can use it for reference. For the purpose of this example, I’m setting up a miscellaneous (MX) ship method. These same steps can really be followed for any other ship method group, i.e. UPS (UP), FedEx (FX), USPS (PS), etc. Anyway, here goes…

You’ll probably want to just do all of your data entry for the shipping stuff in VisualLink. Gather all of the company/division pairs that you want to set up. Remember, you’ll want to include company 00 and division 00 in your setup as well, just for defaults. Ecometry suggests this in case “something goes wrong” and a ship method cannot be found for your company/division pair. So, if I’m setting up a new MX ship method, say 07, we’d have the following for a company/division 03/31:

With this data in visual link, activate Warehouse Management under Warehousing and Shipping. Go into Ship Methods Entry and enter the information for the company/division/ship method combinations like you see in the table above. Once you’re done, we can move on to the next step.

As a side note, in our setup, I used ship method 07 for USPS Express Mail so we could integrate Endicia with one of our companies (more on that in a future post).

Now you can go into Shipper Data Entry. This is the tricky part. You need to set up the shipper data for each company/division/warehouse/ship method group (you’ll also have to include company division 00/00 as fall back defaults). If you already have miscellaneous ship methods set up, this part is probably done already, as it was for me. If not, you need to provide any shipping account, manifest, or server information required to set up the shipping method. So it would be best to have that all in front of you before you begin.

One other point of note is that even if you don’t use warehouse 01, you need to set it up for each ship method. We’re using warehouse 03 in our example here. So we’d have to set up warehouse 01 and warehouse 03.

Anyway, if I were to have to set this up, I would have used the following table of values to set up my shipper data:

For a miscellaneous ship method group, you can just enter 1 for the Carrier ID and Manifest Numbers. For FedEx, you’d want to enter all of your FedEx account and server information (sometimes you have to enter P in the Carrier ID field to get the right fields to come up.). I’m sure UPS and other carriers are similar to FedEx.

Now, assuming you have all of that set up right, its time to set up Postage and Handling routines. Get our of Warehouse and Shipping and go back to the VisualLink start screen. Under Advertising and Sales, you want to get into Advertising Control. Once there, get into P & H Management. I’ve always wondered why this stuff is here in this module, but I think it has to do with the fact that P&H routines are tied to advertising offer codes.

You’re in P&H Management, so type in your company name. Its time to set up P&H routines, set up shipping zones, and zone charges.

At the P&H Management screen, type in your company then hit enter. Then active P&H Routines at the bottom of the screen.