Zones, Zones and Zones

[Parthian]

Hi,

I'm setting up a cart to sell to 3 Shipping Zones.
UK, Europe and RestofWorld(RoW).

I managed to get a bit confused over the term Zone. It appears to mean a 'Regional' Zone setup in Location/Taxes - Zones. So e.g. a part of the US or Australia.

Then there is a Zone Definition. This is a list of groups of countries brought together for tax purposes. I've created 3 UK VAT Zone, EU VAT Zone and RoW Tax Zone. Each contains a list of countries with 'All Zones' set in my case.

Finally there is Shipping Zone within Shipping Modules.
These as default are 3 'Zones' into which shipping prices brackets can be set.

So I think I've figured it out. Hence the title above Zones, Zones and Zones. Is my description above correct?

When it comes to adding countries there doesn't seem to be an easy way without a hard slog.

Luckily I don't care about Zones.
But for Zone Definitions it appears that each country has to manually 'Inserted'. This is time consuming for Europe (go through a very long list 30-40 times) but for RoW would entail 200+ Inserts.

Presumably the idea is that SQL is used. Do SQL commands exist for inserting countries as above (RoW couldn't include European countries).

Finally, for Shipping Zones is gets worse. For each of the Tax Zones I need to create parallel entries for shipping. This involves looking through the Country Codes to find the 2 character code for each country and entering them in a comma separated list.
Is this correct? Has anyone done this?


So the above is fine for a handful of countries but impractical for lots of countries. Do people just ship to a few countries?
Or have I got something terrible wrong?


Cheers

Stuart

[Absolute]

Nope you have everything right so far!

We cheat - we use phpMyAdmin, and then just extra the countries I want to ship to as a CSV list, then just copy and paste that into the shipping module.

With regard adding all countries to a zone, it is actually easier to add all of tehm, then just take out the ones you don't want. Weadd tehm all using a single SQL statement. Something like:

insert into zones_to_geo_zones (zone_country_id, zone_id, geo_zone_id) select countries_id, 0, YOUR_GEO_ZONE_ID from countries

That code may need a little tweak, but should add all your coutnries to the geo zone YOUR_GEO_ZONE_ID - just change this value to the actual geo_zone_id.

Absolute