Shipping Management

[Marco B]

I'm looking at the possibility of creating a "Shipping Manager" in the zen-cart admin section.

Something that can support plugins for communicating with shipping provider API's. I'm wondering if anything similar has been attempted where I could use some of the code. I would start with building a USPS and or AusPost plugin to get it going and others could be added later.

The idea is to support the label printing functionality, Which would then allow for tracking info to be sent to the customer automatically. The labels could be stored at the shop and printed at your convenience. That will get a vital part of order management built into the back-end.

Anyone got any suggestions?

[Marco B]

bump..

So from what I can gather no-one is interested in a shipping management UI for handling shipping on lots of orders which also integrates with Shipping providers to properly handle:

Shipping Provider label printing
Item shipped email templates with tracking codes and Order status updates
generally improved functionality to handle shipping on busy stores.

Future possibility for the system to handle drop shipping/items going out from multiple locations or different providers. (At that point this shipping manager would have to be extended to bypass the shipping class in the ZenCart core and fully control the shipping quotes behavior.)
Future possibility to properly support COD based on shipping provider quotes. You could implement COD where the customer is charged for the shipping cost up-front and the item cost on delivery.
Could add order tracking - where store periodically requests tracking data on shipped orders - and order status updates once the provider says it's been delivered.

Either no-one using ZenCart would use that or I have created this thread in the wrong forum!
I just want to know if there is any interest in this sort of thing or if the "click and ship" style workaround is adequate for most people.

How many people use services like Stamps.com? If that functionality was added to the ZenCart back-end for free would that be of use to anyone?

Obviously I'd only support USPS shipping labels for starters but the system would be modular so anyone can add code for other shipping providers and have it 'plug-in'
I could create a code specification in the ZenCart wiki for the plugins to show the required methods, supported input variables, and return value data structure.

With a team effort anything is possible. I know it sounds big - though if you start small, and break it down into tiny modules you'll eventually create a system that will handle all that stuff.

I see ZenCart lacking in some important back end features for handling lots of orders, some of them have been addressed with community addons, though I believe shipping still needs a bit of work. Allot of the stuff I've seen with shipping seems more like a workaround than a friendly flexible system.

Will someone correct me if i'm wrong and point me to a community add on that does allot of what I just described?

[schoolboy]

Conor Kerr (ceon) has, over the years, devoted many hundreds of hours to shipping and payment modules. You may care to send him a PM to see what he feels.

I do think that many zenners would like the idea of API shipping modules. My own view is that the shippers should develop these API's themselves and offer them to ZC users (for free), which would encourage zenners to subscribe to their shipping services.

But few of us have the time to devote to developing these things... unless of course there's some commercial gain to cover us for the time we'd be taking away from our commercial ventures.