Shipper 1.4.8 Release Candidate 1

New builds of both Shipper and Shipper Service are now available. These builds improve the reliability of communication between your shipping computer and your web site.

Once a month or so, I see a flurry 5-10 automated error reports that a message going from Shipper Service back to Shipper is corrupted. Normally Shipper will just try again. But in these cases, the error occurs over and over for several minutes. Although I have never been able to reproduce the problem in testing, I suspect it has to do with the way the messages are being compressed. So I have tweaked the compression scheme and I hope this spells the end of this particular message.

Change to Shipper Service for BVC5

The other significant change only affects Shipper Service for BVC5. Starting with release 1.4.8, the carrier information that is downloaded from the store will include both the carrier name and the name of the shipping method that the customer selected. For example, let's say that you have 2 shipping methods called FedEx Standard and FedEx Expedited, and that both methods are identical except that FedEx Expedited includes a $10 surcharge to provide expedited handling.

In previous versions of Shipper Service for BVC5, only the carrier and service would have been downloaded regardless of which shipping method was selected, and the shipping department would not know if they should expedite the handling or not. In this version of Shipper Service for BVC5, both the carrier and shipping method name are included:

Old:	FedEx / Ground
New:	FedEx (FedEx Expedited) / Ground

Note that this will break any Shipper service assignments that depend on the old shipment carrier text. You will need to update the service assignments (Tools > Options > More Settings > Service Assignemnts) or simply re-assign the services (Edit > Prepare Shipment > save the assignment).

Downloads

With this release, I have also brought all the component versions back into sync (at 1.4.8) and configured Shipper 1.4.8 so that it requires Shipper Service 1.4.8 or above. This means that if you install this release candidate, you will need to install both Shipper and Shipper Service for your store.

Shipper
Shipper Service for StoreFront
Shipper Service for BVC2004
Shipper Service for BVC5
Shipper Service for BVC5 SP2

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