@eburtonlab
By technicality, you are right — it is also not helpful to just be critical of another response without providing any input beyond that.
But that's far too often a problem on these boards, i.e. someone comes in with "This [Insert Lesser Utilized Feature] Isn't Working" post, only for someone to comment with a passively dismissive 'well, you shouldn't even need to use that feature anyway so...'
... you know, as if that somehow makes it okay that there's an ongoing problem with the website.
And I don't think that community members like @soh.maryl actually intend for their input to be taken so negatively (or realize why it's such a hot button topic), but I can tell you from years of first hand experience that this specific feature for some reason draws an unnatural amount of these types of unsympathetic responses (second only to 'Request Total'). Even eBay's own customer service team is passively guilty of it, asking us — when we're literally calling in to report on technical errors in an attempt to get them fixed — why we don't just make shipping tables, or factor the shipping into our items and do it 'free'... well, because we shouldn't have to.
But to some extent, that's always been the problem with LTL. Most people don't fully realize how difficult it truly is to accurately factor in the volatility of it's pricing structure, especially when it comes to surcharges. By doing our rate quotes manually on a case by case basis, we literally save our customers *hundreds* of dollars, without having to inflate our prices just to offset costs. The only way we can do that is through the invoicing system. No other way around it.
