Geoff,

There is definately always going to be at least some additional delay when using real time shipping rates because there is quite alot of calculating being performed by the UPS, Fedex, USPS, etc rates server. This delay is typically not excessive unless your shipping carriers server is overloaded at the time or is having a problem. It will also depend how many items as well as different items are in your cart at the time, more items, more calculating to be performed. We have rates returned from FedEx, UPS, and US Postal, and even while using all three at once, the time to calculate & return the rates is typically only in the 3-5 second range.

I have a store that uses both custom shipping and UPS.

The UPS option retrieves shipping rates based on my UPS ID from a remote server for cost of various services based on my zip, customers zip and the package weight.

My custom shipping options make a database query on my hosting server.

I find that I have highly variable waiting times for shipping costing information to be returned. The page (chooseshpmnt.asp) can take between 5s and <0.25s to be served.

Do other PC users experience the same issue? If the issue is - as I think the time waiting for information from the UPS client - is there a work around?