Sometimes calling a carrier plugin (API) can fail because the carrier’s service is temporarily down. In Shipping Director, after an Option rule you can reference the $ShippingOptionsCount variable in expressions to check the number of shipping methods returned by an external shipping provider. If no methods are returned, then you can have alternate shipping methods/rates so that your customer can continue checkout. For example, you could have
100
Option FedEx true
Shipping.FedEx
120 Option UPS [$ShippingOptionsCount] = 0 Shipping.UPS
Note that you can't use OptionExit on your plugin's rule (because Exit will stop processing further rules), so you do have to be careful about what rules follow. An alternative would be to have an "End" rule which you could $Goto - e.g.
100 Option FedEx true Shipping.FedEx
110 Integer $Goto [$ShippingOptionsCount] = 0 ? 0 : 9999
100 Option UPS true Shipping.UPS
... other rules ...
9999 String "The End"
( $Goto 0 just goes to the next line. I.e., "if no options then go to next line else got to the end")
P.S. You may want to
consider “normalizing” the carrier method names using the Name Expression on
the Option rule – e.g. both “FedEx Ground” and “UPS Ground” can be shown to the
customer as “Economy Shipping”, and “FedEx Priority” and “UPS Next Day” can
show as “Priority Shipping”.
