My unique Shipping and Handling scenario

[biglazy]

Thanks dbltoe and Stevesh for the feedback. I'm working with two different companies (on two different sites) that want an online shopping cart. Both businesses are distributors and both companies work with multiple maufacturers.

The problem arises in that customers to each of these sites will be able to order products that will ship out from one or more different manufacturers located throughout the country. So a customer might order three products while visiting, and product one would be shipped from CA, product two would be shipped from florida, and product three would be shipped from Texas.

Unfortunatly these products run a very wide spectrum from small items weighing less than 5 lbs (and could probably be set up with a flat country wide shipping price) to equipment weighing several hundred pounds requiring delivery via freight transport. Because of the price difference for shipping a freight item from one side of the country to the other can be pretty signifigant, the customers of the website, are not going to be ok with over paying on shipping costs if I automatically set it for the most expensive option, or even the average.

i see what you guys mean about this being too complex for the volunteer community since it seems there are a lot of people out there looking for something similar (drop ship module) although not exactly the same.

i dont know if I want to spend a bunch of money hiring a programer, so i think i'm going to try and figure out how to program this on my own. Any suggestions on where to get started would be appreciated though.

thanks,
mike

[dbltoe]

AHHHHHHH.....

Looks like the answer would be to look at shipping by product or manufacturer to establish the zone or zip for its origination. Then the system could use any standard shipping module to establish the shipping item by item.

You'd probably need to set up a loop to go through each item in the cart, check the fee from ITS origin, and ultimately add all the charges together to get the final figure.

I.e. Look at cartItem1, establish its origin, use origin and shipping address to get rate, add to rateTotal, got to cartItem2 .....

Shipping and handling might get interesting but could be covered in, say, the UPS mod. It would just add fees per item versus the overall shipping.

Would make a good mod. Hope you can get it done or find a taker.

[stevesh]

Yup, there is a lot of interest here in dropshipping.

You could ask the current Zenners with dropshipping sites how they're handling shipping. A search for dropship in the forums will reveal plenty of posts, no real answers that I can see.

I suppose it would be possible to work out a scheme that sort of averaged the shipping costs over a large number of orders, but I'm no programmer.

[biglazy]

I actually found something that might work for what I want to do, at least for the moment. It's called XUPS (part of a package called XDrop Ship) and the company that makes it also offers custom coding if you need something specific and it looks like the price is reasonable enough that I can just buy this module and not have to worry about all that fancy book learnin I was going to do.

I don't know if i'm supposed to post links to commercial companies, or not but if you do a search for zencartconsulting you should be able to find the company.

From my conversation with the sales person this will take care of assigning zip codes to different manufacturers which then will feed into the API for UPS. I'll still need to get some custom coding for the freight shipping, and dimensions however, but it sounds like they wouldn't have a problem programing that in, provided I pay their per hour programing charge.

[ontwolf]

I need the same module as everyone here has stated. I am in the process of converting an osc shipping module that does exactly as "biglazy" is recomending, however, I fell into a couple of cliches.

first I got the mod to install and be altered, but on customer side, when they go to checkout or estimate shipping the screen is blank.

If someone can help in this area then there would be alot of happy people here.