At Home Business - How can you process multiple shipments really fast?

At times you may need to ship multiple packages, and generating shipments manually for each package would just take too much time.

We use UPS and I had 40+ packages to ship and thought there must be a better way to do this vs creating each shipment manually.

After looking into the UPS shipping menu on their online portal, we found the - Ship using a Batch File - option. This seemed like a perfect option. They even offered a template file so you can quickly add your information, upload and create all of those labels in one quick step. We were so excited. We followed their instructions on the required fields and the codes to signify the packaging and shipping type exactly as laid out. We then uploaded our csv file, selected three values and clicked on Next.

We immediately received an error - >>> There was an error processing the file. No matter how many ways we tried to modify the info we continued to receive this error. We found a document somewhere online that told us we could download a csv error file telling us what was wrong. This was nowhere to be found.

After an hour of searching online and trying several things to alleviate the problem for something that should have been so simple, we reached out to our UPS rep. After a few emails he could not figure out what was wrong and sent us to UPS customer care. We reviewed the issues with them for about 20 minutes and since they could not figure it out, they asked us to send them our file.

They promised we’d have it back in 15 minutes. 2 hours later and after several follows ups, we received the file.

Guess what the fix is? – the file you download has a top row or what you would call a header. You have to delete this after you enter your data!

We really hope anyone else dealing with this finds this blog because we consider ourselves pretty good troubleshooters and typically can find a solution for everything via Google, but we could not find this one.

Remember if using Ship using a Batch File via UPS.com and receive an "error - >>> There was an error processing the file", check to see if you deleted the top row or header provided in the template file.

Hopefully UPS will also add this to their tutorials online.

We love UPS and will always use their service which is amazing. This was one item that caused us some time delay but the rest of our experience with UPS is fantastic.

 

I'm just posting this here since I did finally find it and it was helpful.

I ran into a different seemingly obscure issue.

An apostrophe in a field for a company name (e.g. Smith's Beer and Cola) caused it to fail with the same not helpful message.