*Before you reply to this comment, remember. We are dealing with the USPS here. I know what I am saying make no sense. This is USPS's fault, not mine

*The last time I looked into this was 6 months ago so my info may be dated, but considering the speed at which the USPS moves, not likely.

USPS Does not have accounts like UPS or Fedex with monthly billing. You have to pay for each shipment, label, or stamp as you go. USPS has a web site similar to UPS or Fedex, but the USPS does not have a XML API which allows you to quote shipments and generate labels. You have to do this on their website or with one of their approved vendors like Endicia Dazzle. The reason they do not have an API is because "we are a government agency and so must be fair to everyone, so we only have two or three partners who can do this , and you have to buy the software from one of them."

The end result of all this cockamamie bull$%@t is that the best way to automate USPS shipments and label printing is to buy Endicia's Dazzle software. You can tell it your database address and table setup and it will automatically generate shipments, print labels, and upload the tracking number to your database. It is a little complicated to setup, but it is doable. If someone who has done it could write a little guide for Dazzle and Ubercart, that would be great. If you know of a better way, tell us. My information is mainly second hand and could certainly be wrong.
Profitprophet's post, New to Drupal, has more discussion about this in question 3b.
Peace
Andy

There has been code written for the UPS module to print labels, but it hasn't been in the repository for a while. I had been confused by the various XML Tools that UPS provides, and I had made a quoter that used the Shipping Tool, but that is a premium service and most people couldn't use it. Since your original post, I've been working on reintegrating the order fulfillment with the newer quoting module.

As long as your account with UPS is set up to use the "Shipping XML Online Tool" and I've committed the changes to the module, you'll be able to create labels based on the information in your orders. Documentation hasn't been written for it yet, but that will be done soon as well.

The (completely undocumented) uc_shipping module handles packaging up products and recording exactly where they go and how they get there. If a shipping method module implements an order fulfillment hook, you can choose it to notify the appropriate parties or systems that a shipment is being made and provide forms for you to enter all the necessary information. As of yesterday, only the UPS module does this.

I'd really like some feedback on how this system works. Mostly I was just making it the way I figured it should work, which may or may not coincide with anybody else's ideas. I'll throw up some documentation so that working with the shipping system will be a bit easier, too.

So, the bottom line is that someone needs to write an Endicia module, but they won't have to make absolutely everything from scratch.

Ben wrote: "While pulling the order information from the MySQL database into Endicia seems fairly straightforward, one thing I'm not clear about is how Endicia would submit via XML the tracking number and shipping status information back to Ubercart."

I am only 90% about this, but I believe Endicia does not submit the tracking number via XML. I believe that you tell Endicia with a user name, password, table, and column for tracking # and order #. Then endicia writes the tracking number directly to the database when the shipment is generated. This works well for getting the tracking # into Ubercart, but will not "automatically notify via email" the customer or site administrator. There are a couple of options here. The easiest is to have the person who just got done setting up the shipment on endicia go to the order page and click a "email tracking number" button. The other option would be to use a mysql stored transaction to automatically email the tracking number every time one is entered in. This is more difficult then it sounds to set up, I think.

I know someone who developed a PHP based interface between dazzle/endicia and zencart.
I will ask him about ubercart/drupal (again).

I'd be interested in contributing to the development of an Endicia module for Ubercart. I view being able to manage, ship, and easily track U.S. Postal Service packages to be an essential need.