Shipping from many places to many places.

[Roon]

We are setting up a zen cart for our artisan site with 5 languages. For the moment we are only in Polish and all our artisans are Polish because my partner is Polish and very well connected there. We are planning to do all EU and N. America because I am in Montreal and will set up a branch of our business here so we can take credit cards etc. for N. America.

Our problem with shipping is this. We are basically just brokers and the products are shipped from the artisan or artist. Drop shipping probably is the best description. Instead of having one place to ship from we will eventually have a plethora of places and I can't imagine how we can automatically calculate shipping costs. Especially with all the different shipping methods etc. We will never-the-less have to find a way to do this or we will never become truly international. I will also post this in the wish list thread in case this problem could be solved by some genius.

[Ajeh]

Zen Cart is not designed for this ...

However, you could customize the products and shipping methods to calculate the individual shipping on the from/to to build a shipping cost ...

This would take quite a bit of custom coding but it can be done ...

[Roon]

That's what I expected. We will have to find some php genius to do this for us. I don't think this is a standard shipping problem for most people. Thanks for your reply Akeh.

[Ajeh]

No, this is by no means a simple one ...

If you could ship from multiple Ship from addresses on a per product ... what shipping method would you be using? As in USPS or UPS or what?

[Roon]

In Europe I think it will be mail. In North America I think it would be UPS. We couldn't offer too many methods or it would become a mare's nest.