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I am working on showing the shipping rates on the product pages, like in Amazon and eBay.

However, because I'll be calling the API a lot more then the usual cart page, I am wondering if there are any limits to USPS API that can prevent me from using the API on product pages?

Do you think I should use some kind of offline processing?

bymannan
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1 Answers1

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No - there are no general limits in USPS web-services specification. Although they have a right to limit you if there is a high-load from your side. Anyway if you will have limit problems they solved either by describing business need for that to USPS or by caching.

I think offline processing will be not an easy thing if you don't know how to do it obviously.

So - avoid offline processing as long as you can.

Vladimir
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  • Thanks Vladimir, what I am now working on is to cache my requests. One problem is that they use the Zone system for rates. And the zones are different per zip code. So that is not going to be easy... – bymannan Jul 30 '12 at 22:17
  • Right @Maxoos, - I know the hell about zones. This is not only the speciality of USPS, but FedEx as well. Also we should not forget that the rules can be changed/updated - and if you cache old results you risk to provide wrong results to the user. – Vladimir Jul 31 '12 at 13:21