Heavy Item Shipping Method

We are adding many items that will require shipping by freight carriers. I figure I can use the Zone shipping Module and plug in the rate charge data. But my question is how do I configure Zen so that if an item weighs more than (say) 70 pounds it will not give them the UPS choice for shipping and forces them to use only the zone shipping data?

I'm using 1.2.4.1 of Zen currently and right now all the items for sale are under 50 pounds and I'm using the UPS module for shipping only.

I'm adding about 30 products that are all over 100 pounds in weight.

I appreciate any assistance that you can offer.

You would need to do a look up on the Products in the cart and see how many, if any, have a weight > 70 lbs ...

There is a nice little function in the shopping_cart class to test various conditions of the products table ...

function in_cart_check($check_what, $check_value='1') {

Then you would need a method to run that function on decide whether or not to allow the shipping module to show ...

It is usually best to make the test a function that can then be used to manage both the admin and catalog as the admin needs to call the function and just return true ... where the catalog you may have other checks or tests to run ...

You are more or less trying to control the $this->enabled in the shipping module ... when false, that hides the shipping module even if the shipping module is installed ...

Easy Smeazy eh? :eek:

hmmm, well I'm a little confused by your message, Ajeh. It sounds from your message that in order to do what I'm attempting I would have to do some PHP programming. As in the existing program does not allow for forcing a different module to come into play based on an items weight.

I was hoping that maybe I could use an attribute definition for making this work. :(
(or something along those lines)

I know all the products currently in the database are 50 pounds or under in weight and I'm adding abou 26 products that are all well over 50 pounds.

I guess that if I can't accomplish special shipping pricing for these 26 products then I'll have to make it so the system does not charge the freight and simply announce on the product description that Freight will be an additional charge based on the delivery address.

I am afraid that in order to use a custom shipping method, you actually need to write custom code to manage that custom shipping method ... :cry:

Or, you could always post in the Commercial Help Wanted or contact the Zen Cart Team to write your custom code, if you are not a programmer ... :smile:

Makes sense. It may be worth it to hire someone to do some customizing. It doesn't sound like it would be too difficult to accomplish.

And I guess I'll have to upgrade to the latest version also. <heavy sigh>

Thanks for your help and advice Ajeh.