Hi,
It gives me great pleasure to release the first version of a new, hugely configurable shipping module for Zen Cart for beta testing!
There are no known bugs, but before we mark this off as being release status we'd like as many people as possible to try it out for themselves.
[FONT="Arial Black"]Module Overview[/FONT]
The Region Tables shipping module is a very comprehensive module for Zen Cart which allows store owners to specify shipping rates based on a combination of the customer's shipping address and either the total weight or the total price of the order.
The rate applied to an order is determined by first identifying which region a customer's shipping address is in.
Each individual region is defined in the module's admin configuration in either of two ways:
- Geolocation - A region can be set as being within a certain distance from the store (in Km/Miles).
- Country/Postcode Matching - A region can be defined as being a country or a country and postcode range combination. (E.g. GB:BT matches all of Northern Ireland).
The regions defined are checked in numerical order to see if they match the customer's address, so any number of methods for determining the customer's region can be employed until a match is found. For example: the first region could be a 10Km radius "Local Delivery" region and the subsequent region could attempt to match an address based on the customer's postcode (or even their country and postcode) if they are outside that region.
Once the region a customer's shipping address is in has been determined, the shipping rate is calculated based either on the weight or the total price of the order.
Unlike most other (actually, any other) Zen Cart shipping modules, Region Tables allows the store owner to specify an unlimited number of sets of rates/shipping methods per region, enabling the possibility of offering a “Standard Delivery” rate, an “Express Delivery (Next Day)” rate and a “Express Delivery (Next Day Before 9AM)” rate, or such like, at the same time. As the tables of rates are specific to a region, each region can have completely different shipping options, allowing for a never-before-seen level of configurability in a shipping module!
[FONT="Arial Black"]We'd greatly appreciate feedback on this module![/FONT]
We've spent a considerable amount of time developing the module and writing the documentation (that alone took days!) so all feedback on how we can make it better, or make the documentation clearer is really appreciated by us.
Because this module is so flexible (certainly compared to any other ZC shipping module), it is essential for us that we make its configuration instructions as simple as possible. We've developed other modules for ZC and the amount of time that can be taken up with helping out users can be considerable, yet those other modules aren't nearly as configurable as this module! We really don't want to be caught up answering questions about this module all the time so hopefully the documentation is easy enough to follow. If not, please make suggestions as to how to improve it (reasonable suggestions only of course ;) ).
[FONT="Arial Black"]Let me have it![/FONT]
Thanks to anyone who beta tests this module! Please post your comments in this thread.
Once the beta testing phase is over well start up a proper support thread on these forums.
The downloads and documentation can be found at:
http://dev.ceon.net/web/zen-cart/regiontables/
All the best...
Conor
ceon
Bookmarks