Show Shipping costs in basket ( header and sidebox )

[ali1neil]

Hey guys&girls , for some time now i have been pouring over this forum and finding all kinds of usefull tips.
There is somthing that is iluding me still.

As a regular online shopper , i wish to see my total costs of purchase before having to click to many times around a website. Larger online stores like amazon and ebay have lead the way (again) with displaying shipping costs with product costs.

For my store i wanted to display the customers "Basket" its total , and the P&P total on a seperate line.

To start out , i installed the shopping_cart header , which works perfectly at getting number of products and the total cost with a nice href link to the shopping_cart page

looking at this code for a while , i noticed that if i added a line like...

$weight = $_SESSION['cart']->show_weight();

it would also return the weight of the "basket" as a number

. now if i used table rates ? i could just write out some php for each price point in one big if statment.

but because i am using Zone Rates , i will need to get some thing a little more advanced .


Having a search around the mods and forums i found
"shipping_estimator_sidebox"
which looks to be a modified popup shipping estimator.

now this works perfectly , in every way i would want it to. however , i want to have the output of this side box apear in my header.

can anyone help with this little project ? i feel it would make an impact on all stores it was used on.

for those interested in my store or the contribs used on it there is an Acknowledgements page with links to contributors pages ( where given )

[ali1neil]

having now spent a good hour on the "shipping Estimator Sidebox" i can now confirm that it doesn't work 100% ( at least it doesn't with the most recent ZenCart ) but i still realy like the idea and where the original contributor was going with this .

If anyone can figure out how to do this , just a little better ? this may all come together ,

real quick , i can see it doing somthing like this

if cart=true customer = false
give a quote based on the current country ( store default ? )

if cart=true customer = true
give a quote based on the Delivery country selected by the customer

but we should still give the customer the option of the drop down menu with countrys list , so they can find out how much it would cost to send to some place else.


all these functions are covered by the pop up shipping calculator , but nothing so far built on a static page ( or in the header - hehe :)

at this point i wonder if just mashing up the shipping popup thingy in a lightbox effect would be somthing i could get away with in the mean time...

again , thanks for looking ..

[ali1neil]

with a total mash up of the tpl shopping cart box , i have started work on a shipping quote sidebox-shopping cart sidebox.

It shows the shopper the cheapest shipping method to their country ( up to a value of 3.3kg , after which they will have to choose the best option from the checkout options )

Split into UK/EU/USA/ROW(row still working on that)

I havn't yet finished it or dressed it up with nice images and what not, but feel free to check it out , leave me your comments..

( note that the sidebox wont apear unless you have an item in your shopping cart )

>> i luv scotland <<


What i havn't realy figured out yet is how to give a total payable cost to the customer..
This way of displaying the total cost of an order to a customer , I feel is a logical step forward for all shop owners.
To actualy show your customer what you intend to charge them? Do it up front and honest , not when they have already provided loads of personal information.