Shipping Methods Question

My client has hundreds of products and ships to many different locations via UPS.
He wants me to input all the weights and geographic zones from the UPS Standard Shipping Chart into the HikaShop Shipping Methods feature.

Questions:
1) Is there an easy way to import all this information?
2) On the first checkout screen, the cost that appears for the shipping will be based on the weight of each product. After the customer inputs the contact information with his city, state and country, will the shipping cost then change to reflect the geographic zone where the product needs to be shipped? At what point in the checkout process will the zone information be accounted for to update the shipping cost?

Thanks again for all your help Nicolas!

My client sells products weighing up to 100 pounds and ships via UPS standard ground to 10 different shipping zones. It looks like I will need to set up 100 x 10 = 1000 shipping methods.
If I worked quickly and were able to create 1 shipping method every 3 minutes, it would still take me 3000 minutes or 50 hours to create the 1000 shipping methods.
Can you suggest some easy way to do this?
How do other people bring UPS shipping data into HikaShop?

Thanks Nicolas.

In order to ship via UPS, do we need to create one shipping zone for each US zip code that we can potentially ship to? Since there are over 40,000 US zip codes, must we create 40,000 shipping zones?
What would you suggest we do here?
My client is willing to ship by FedEx instead of UPS...does HikaShop offer a FedEx plugin?

I'll look forward to being able to use HikaShop shipping plugins at some point.
Thanks again for your help and quick response to my questions Nicolas.

UPS divides the 40,000 US zip codes into 10 shipping zones and each zone has different shipping prices according to the weight of the package.
My client ships products that weigh from 1 to 60 pounds.

Given the above facts, I plan to manually input the entire UPS Standard shipping chart into HikaShop by following these steps:
*Create 10 shipping zones.
*Place all 40,000 zip codes into the 10 shipping zones by making the zip codes shipping sub-zones.
*Create 600 shipping methods (10 shipping zones x the weight of 1 through 60 pounds).
*For each of the 10 shipping methods, specify a shipping zone, a product weight and a price.

Questions:
1)Would this be the correct way to get all the UPS data into HikaShop?
Have I left out any steps?
2)How can I input a range of zip codes rather than all the individual zip codes?
What parameter or format should I use so that HikaShop recognizes zip codes as a range?
3)If I place all the zip codes into shipping sub-zones, will HikaShop then be able to recognize the zip codes and give the correct shipping price when customers type in their shipping address?

I'm not clear about where to enter the zip codes in the shipping methods options.
There is only minimum and maximum price, weight and volume.
Please explain further...

That's great Nicolas...thanks!

I am a little confused at how complex this is becoming. We have a customer who want to ship UPS. The first problem is determining the shipping charge. It seems to me all you need to do is collect some basic information, Shipping zip, Receiving zip, weight and type of service. Send this request to UPS and a price is returned. A more complex version is to send all the details for a confirmed shipment which will generate the shipping label.

All the talk about loading the UPS zones and pricing does not seem to be necessary.

I understand the worldwide nature of Hika, but for large markets like USA I would think determining UPS Shipping cost is necessary, creating labels is a reasonable expectation.

Yes, I can collect this information: shipping zip, receiving zip, weight and type of service but then I would need to link over to UPS to calculate the shipping charge and then download that cost back into the checkout form. This is all usually done automatically through a UPS shipping plugin attached to the shopping cart and this kind of plugin is not available for HikaShop. Without this plugin, we need to manually load all the zip code ranges, the price to ship to each range and all the possible product weights. If you can come up with an easy and fast way to do this, please let me know and please provide the steps/details.

Nicolas, I have a friend in UPS I/T. Please send me offline the id you used and a little about the request. I will see if I can move your request along.

First off thanks for this wonderful eCommerce solution for Joomla!. I haven't found any hiccups other then this current issue. I have been racking my brain trying to figure out what to do about the shipping method. I was curious if there has been any progress. I really want to use this instead of the alternatives that are fully intergrated with joomla.