WooCommerce UPS Shipping – Can a Third-Party’s UPS account pay the Shipping Charges?

In this guide, we will show you the steps to enable the Third Party option and print a Bill of Lading using the WooCommerce UPS Shipping plugin. Read along to know more. 

What is a Bill of Lading?

Bill of Lading is a standardized bill of lading form created by the VICS(Voluntary Inter-Industry Commerce Standards) and is primarily used by the general merchandise retail industry.

The Bill of Lading or BoL is a legally bound document that details the type, quantity, and destination of the goods being transported. This document is to accompany the shipped goods no matter the form of transportation. The BoL needs to be duly signed by, the shipper, the carrier, and the receiver.

Once the bill has been signed by the carrier(UPS), it means that the carrier agrees with the contents of the shipment. When the bill is signed by the retailer it means that the retailer agrees with the contents that are being shipped.

So in layman’s terms, the BoL is a legal document that assures the safe delivery of the merchandise.


A real business case – Can a Third Party pay the Bill of Lading charges?

As you may know, the bill provided by UPS contains three payment options – Prepaid, Collect and Third Party Prepaid. Based on your business model and shipping needs, you can select any one of the three options.

sample bill of lading

One of our customers ships freight parcels using UPS freight services. He wanted to print the BOL(Bill of Lading) with the Third Party as the payer. Let’s how the WooCommerce UPS Shipping Plugin helps him achieve that. 


How to print a Bill of Lading for your Freight Shipments?

With our WooCommerce UPS Shipping plugin(version 3.12.4 or above), you can go into the plugin settings page and hover down to the Freight section. Refer to the screenshot below. 

select bill of lading

Here you need to select the Bill to Third Party option under the Payment Information section. After that, you need to add the details like Contact Name, Address, and Postal Code

Once this information is filled in correctly, the rates will be displayed associated with the Third Party’s account. Most of the UPS users indeed avail discounted rates which are associated with the Third Party address. Hence there’s a need to indicate this on the Bill of Lading document.

As soon as this is done, you are ready to place the orders, generate packages and print labels with the mentioned Third Party as the payer. 

generate ups label for third party

Conclusion

So that’s it!

In this article, we have discussed one of the major concerns of a store owner – can a Third Party’s UPS account pay for the shipping charges?

We also discussed how the WooCommerce UPS Shipping plugin plays an important role in helping you ship freight shipments.

We hope that this article was able to clear all the doubts. If you have any queries regarding UPS Shipping then please Contact PluginHive Customer Support. Our team will be able to help you out.

Good luck!