Custom Rate Engine toolkit - Introduction

The Custom Rate Engine toolkit provides the means to generate custom carrier rates based on standard Pierbridge Rate Request and Response XML transactions. The purpose of the toolkit is to enable creation of Custom Rate Engines for any supported carrier. The toolkit is available on the Downloads page.

The Custom Rate Engine toolkit supports rating based on existing shipping rate functionality, which allows custom rates to be applied to a number of scenarios such as rating based on service and package types as well as user locations. In addition, the Custom Rate Engine toolkit permits customization of rate options in a similar manner to standard carrier rating functionality.

The toolkit has been extended to receive the Pierbridge Rate or Ship Response from the carrier as a child element of the Pierbridge Rate Request. This gives the Custom Rate Engine access the carriers own rates and enable it to generate custom rates based on these. The toolkit includes sample Pierbridge Rate Request and Response XML.

The purpose of this content is to provide insight into developing a Custom Rate Engine following the Windows-based examples included in the toolkit: C#, VB.NET and ASP. These examples which can be modified to meet the needs of the project. The Custom Rate Engine can be implemented on any platform or stack of choice such as LAMP. The source code is distributed openly.