Summary: Purolator rates fail with a 401 or a 403 sent back by Purolator. The address, weight, and service on the shipment are not the problem. Fix the Purolator API key and secret on each shipping profile, and ask Purolator to turn on rating (Get Estimate) for your account.

Problem

You try to rate or ship with Purolator and it fails. Different orders can show different messages. One order comes back as a 401 Unauthorized, and another comes back as:

The request failed with HTTP status 403: Forbidden

Cause

Both messages come from Purolator's own server, and they come back before Purolator ever looks at the shipment. That means the addresses, the weight, and the service code are not the cause.

  • 401 Unauthorized means Purolator did not accept the username and password (the API key and secret). The key may be wrong, changed, or expired, the billing account may not be tied to that key on Purolator's side, or the key may be a test key being used against the live service.
  • 403 Forbidden means Purolator accepted the key but will not allow the call. Most often rating (Get Estimate) has not been turned on for the key, the ship-from address on the shipment does not match the address registered on the key, or the account is locked after repeated failed sign-ins.

How to check: if the shipment itself were the problem, Purolator would send back a Purolator error code telling you which field is wrong. A plain 401 or 403 with no code points at the account, not the order.

Fix

  1. Write down whether each failing order shows 401 or 403. It can differ from order to order, and the two are fixed in different places.
  2. Open each shipping profile that has Purolator set up and check the Purolator API key and secret. A profile with no key, or one still holding test or default values, fails every time.
  3. Enter the live API key and secret on every profile that is missing them.
  4. For a 401, check with Purolator that the key and secret are current and that your billing account is tied to that key.
  5. For a 403, ask Purolator's web services team to turn on Get Estimate (rating) for the account and for each live key, and to confirm the ship-from address registered on the key matches the address you ship from.
  6. If you cannot see or change the carrier keys yourself, email support@shipstore.com and say which profiles fail and whether each one shows 401 or 403.
  7. Rate a test shipment on each profile you changed.

What you should see

Rates come back instead of a 401 or a 403, and a label prints on a profile that used to fail.

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