Need help with pricing shipping from two sources

[Wolfmont]

Hi! I need help on a couple of issues, but I'll put them in two different threads so they don't get all mixed up.

First of all, I have a very different sort of setup as regards how my store works. I sell books, both hardcopy and ebooks. But my store represents many authors who actually keep the stock (books) at their homes. When someone orders a book, Zencart computes the shipping charges for that book, and I send the order to the author, who fulfills the order. I pay the author their wholesale price for the book, plus the shipping charges.

Thus far, no order has had a mixture of source addresses. But I'm anticipating the day when someone will want to order a book from each of two authors, one in New York and one in Texas. Zencart will look at the combined weight of the two books and compute only the amount of shipping necessary to ship from one address, and that will not work at all.

Is there a way to weight the shipping calculation so books from different sources are calculated separately re: shipping? I thought of adding the shipping charge directly to the book, but that could result in multiple books from the same source being charged an enormously high shipping charge, making customers very unhappy.

I have very little experience using attributes, as they mostly confuse me. Could attributes be a way to fix this, and if so, how?

I am using ZC 1.3.8 and the only add-on I have installed is the Sales Report addon that allows me to have more detailed reports.

My store is at www.digital-bookshop.com .

Thanks for any help!

[stevesh]

You might Google for 'ceon advanced shipping' for a (non-free, but reasonable) Zencart mod that should do what you need.

[Wolfmont]

Well, I read through the features and bit the bullet... hope that it's worth the 50 GBP, and works for what I need.

[Wolfmont]

Ack! I paid for, downloaded and installed the Ceon Advanced Shipper.

I followed the instructions to the letter.

When I go to the "Advanced Shipper Config" menu option, here is what I get:

Warning: main(/home/content/d/i/g/digitalbooks/html/zencart/includes/functions/advshipper.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/d/i/g/digitalbooks/html/zencart/rattrap-admin/includes/functions/advshipper.php on line 16

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required '/home/content/d/i/g/digitalbooks/html/zencart/includes/functions/advshipper.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/content/d/i/g/digitalbooks/html/zencart/rattrap-admin/includes/functions/advshipper.php on line 16

So, I bought the package but now can't make it work. Any ideas?? I have contacted Ceon, but no response yet. Granted, it hasn't been all that long, but I was just wondering if anyone here has had this issue, and solved it.

[Wolfmont]

I found ONE file in the wrong folder and it buggered it all up.



Fixed it.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to set up the bloody thing.

[Wolfmont]

OK, I bought the product. I have read the documentation. I've gotten a couple of support emails from Ceon.

I still don't understand how this thing works, or how it will help me to do what I need to do.

If anyone out there has actually used the Ceon Advanced Shipper program is willing to help me by answering a few questions, I'd be very grateful.

Anyway, to recap, here is what I need to do:

I sell books that may be shipped from any of many different sources, depending on the author or publisher. If someone orders books from multiple sources right now (say two books from one author and one from another), ZC automatically calculates the shipping as a single fee, based on the weight of the books. That won't work because each time a shipment is initiated into the postal system, there is a base charge. So, ZC may calculate the total shipping to be $4.50, but the actual fees incurred would be $7.50 because there are two actual shipments.

I need to be able to set up shipping so ZC is cognizant of the source of the shipments, and sets up separate shipping charges accordingly.

I considered building the shipping charges into the cost of each book, but that means if someone orders two books from the same source (author or publisher), they are overcharged.

Stevesh recommended Ceon Advanced Shipper, so I bought that, but I can't figure out how to make it work. Now that I have paid for it, it doesn't appear that it can do what I want it to do, unfortunately, and there are no refunds.

If someone can prove me wrong on that, and show me how to do what I need to do, I'd be very happy!

[Wolfmont]

With a combination of nudges from Ceon's tech support, blind luck, and reading the documentation, the Advanced Shipper now works as it should.

Nice, very nice, too!

Tony

[stevesh]

Stevesh recommended Ceon Advanced Shipper, so I bought that

For the record, I didn't recommend the Ceon module, just pointed out its availability. I haven't used it myself (yet).

Glad you got it set up and that it's doing the job for you.

[Wolfmont]

Yes, it's good, but the documentation is sort of arcane. With Conor's help (from Ceon), I managed to get it going. I've found the same problem for documentation with a few of the mods.

It seems that some of the people who write the mods write their instructions as though we are all starting from the same point of knowledge reference. For instance, I've tried a couple of the cross-sell mods and their documentation on how to set up the cross-sell jumps into a set of instructions in the middle, saying to modify this or that by typing a line of code into some file.

The problem is, I have no idea what files they are talking about, so I read and read, and get absolutely frustrated because even though it's obvious that the developer knew exactly what he or she was doing, they have no clue how to communicate that to the end user. Giving me directions that say "Turn right at the red light and go 1/2 mile, then turn left and you're there," may sound simple, but without some good directions as to how to get to that red light, the directions don't help very much. So, I still have no clue about how to set up the cross-selling.

I wrote tech manuals and tech training curricula for a long time, and I know that most developers have a knowledge set that is very different from most end users. Also, from working in that industry for years, I learned that most developers consider good documentation of how to use their product to be secondary, or maybe even tertiary, to simply developing the next product.