Designating Shipping Carrier

[japanophyle]

Thank you for the lengthy and thoughtful reply.

My situation is a bit unique on a few levels:

- Our entire audience is essentially the international market. The site I run is on behalf of a shop in Japan (I'm actually located in the US). They already have a Japanese language site for their domestic customers and I use ZC to serve the English language site for the international audience. The vast majority of our customers are in Europe, but we've had orders from the US, South America other Asian countries and South Africa.

- The audience is small, as there are only about 2000 - 3000 people outside of Japan who would want to purchase our goods (equipment for the Japanese art of kyudo).

- I am the one person who does all work on the English site. I maintain product line, handle server and ZC maintanence and do all communications translations. So passing the buck isn't really an option!

- The extra long pieces of equipment that I mention are primary pieces of equipment to the art (they are the bows!) and so there are pretty frequent orders for them. It's ok to pack other items (uniforms, etc) in with the bows, as long as the bows ship UPS and not Express Mail.

Given all of this, it still may be too much trouble to customize the cart to handle the shipping appropriately for me. Honestly, I'm having a hard time getting the shop to give me the weights of all items and the shipping tables, they still insist on calculating shipping manually for each order. I was hoping to talk them into letting the site calculate this for them when I go to Japan this spring to meet with them. But I'm trying to keep on top of all of the ZC features that might be useful in this kind of a situation.

Again, I appreciate the reply, and welcome other suggestions! I'm a one-woman show here, and need all the help I can get. Did I mention that this work is in addition to a full time job and raising a toddler? :)

[tvadpro]

Sounds precarious.

If there is no shipping weight in the product data, how does UPS quote shipping for the order?

Having such a small market might simplify the issue of how to limit shipping choices. Say the product description advises customers to select UPS shipping only when purchasing one or more bows. I suspect not many of them will make the mistake of selecting Express shipping during checkout -- so when this happens, would it be too much of a hassle to email the buyer and remedy the misunderstanding prior to shipping the product?

If the non-programming option involves too much hand-holding during sales, you can put bows in a separate product type, then implement some custom code to check for mixed product types in the cart and (if true) instruct the customer to order the bows and non-bows separately. If you need to contract the programming, I can enthusiastically recommend the person who did just such a custom project for me about a year ago. Since then, the sales model changed, making the cart modifications obsolete -- hence I can't show you a demo. The programmer did an excellent job with it, though.

The audience is small, as there are only about 2000 - 3000 people outside of Japan who would want to purchase our goods (equipment for the Japanese art of kyudo).

[kusogaki]

This sounds rather interesting, but before I try out the hacks from the other thread, there are several things I'd like to know if it could handle.

On my website, we sell small items...such as comic books, DVDs and that sort of thing. One additional item we sell is something much larger (not necessarily weight-wise) but is about the size of a small boat oar. They just just nicely in the USPS priority mail poster boxes however.

Now, what I'm trying to do is to force separate shipping on said boat oar since I can't really package an order for comic books and that together. I imagine if I were to use that hack with the usps mod (I figure it should be similar in concept...) that I can then select weightperunit shipping mod for the oar. But if I were again, to have a mixed order...will it add the two shipping totals together or would they just ######## heads and throw me an error?

I'm hoping this works as we are working on adding non-media type items to the store but I want to have media mail as an option as well.

Chris

[tvadpro]

Sounds like you'd have to hack your way around the mixed basket, Chris. Normally, if your customer buys a poster-tube item with media mail items, only one method of shipping can be selected.

I'm hesitant to recommend any approach that disables the checkout button, as with that check-for-mixed-items-and-demand-customer-orders-one-at-a-time hack. To do so is to disrupt the checkout and probably kill sales. It's like the clerk at Wal-Mart refusing to scan one of your items unless you pay for your other selections first, then go to the back of the line and purchase the oddball item separately. (There are exceptions to every rule, as with firearms and ammunition: brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S. are forbidden from selling these together.)

So, what would happen if you gave the pseudo-boat-oar product(s) a mandatory option-attribute called "separate package shipping" or some such -- and priced the attribute to cover your extra shipping expense?

The hacks I'm using on my Shed Kit shop eliminate UPS from the list of available shipping methods when total shipping weight >=800 pounds -- and eliminate common carrier methods when total shipping weight <800 pounds. But I doubt this kind of tweak is appropriate for a store needing to charge for two shipments on one order.

If the options-attributes approach doesn't float your boat, don't give up -- where there's a will, there's a weigh.

But if I were again, to have a mixed order...will it add the two shipping totals together or would they just ######## heads and throw me an error?