Yet another shipping challenge

[Goshawk]

Hi all,

I ship products from different locations, both from my local store in Australia and also from a factory in China for custom made items.
Therefore I need a shipping option based on product location, as different shipping rates apply.

To date I have overcome this issue by sending my overseas stock free (built in the price). This is OK if I get an order for only one item, but with larger volume orders shipping becomes cheaper.

I am now developing a wholesale section to my shop and anticipate larger orders to be send from the factory in China. It would be unfair to my customers to keep building the shipping cost in the total product cost.

In the product listing page in the manager, you have an option to select "free shipping", would it be possible to set up another choice where I can select which shipping rule applies to the product?

To me that would be the logical answer and it could also be part of the next Zen Cart as standard. I am sure that it would overcome many shipping problems that people have encountered, and would allow store owners to set up special discount rates if needed for promotional sales etc. (Buy one and next one ships free this month). That would be good specially for larger items where shipping cost can be expensive.

Thanks for your anticipated thoughts on this one.

Goshawk

[Ajeh]

I have written this before to add the ship from info to the product for a site that only sold 1 product at a time ...

However, as you sell more than one product at a time you would need to customize the shipping modules to "build" the shipping price from all of the products in the order ... this would get a lot trickier ...

Have you got your coder hat on?!

[whysean]

I have the same problem. I am shipping books from one location and T-shirts from another. If a customer orders both books and T-shirts, there are two shipping charges that need to be applied.

[Goshawk]

Thanks Ajeh,

I can see that would be a challenge for the checkout.
Would it then be possible to achieve this by creating a new product type?
Say one that would be called "product - general" for one shipping method and another "product - made to order" with another shipping method?
Now you have a "product - free shipping" and this can be selected in the product listing page. That would have the same checkout challenge, right?

Goshawk