How best to make internation shipping a "Contact us" option?

[michaeltw]

Hi, in my store we really only have two products, each has it's own flat shipping option. I'm using the Per Unit module with the weight substituting for the flat item shipping cost and it's fine for what we need.

Those fees are only for US shipping, is there a way to make it so if they were an international order, they would have to contact us before ordering/finishing an order? Do I remove international options and add a banner somewhere? Is there a better, automated solution for this?

Thanks!

[cvhainb]

Edit your shipping module so that it shows "Contact Us" link when order is international.

[michaeltw]

Thanks for the suggestions - could you elaborate at all? I took a look but I'm not seeing the option for that.

Sorry if I'm missing the obvious.

[balihr]

The simplest solution is to create a Zone and have only US assigned to it. Then go to your shipping module and assign that zone to the module. From now on, all of your international customer will get to the checkout_shipping page and won't be able to choose any shipping options. Instead, they'll see a message saying "Sorry, we are not shipping to your region at this time. Please contact us for alternate arrangements."

You can change that line in includes/languages/english/checkout_shipping.php (don't forget to check if there's an override in your template's directory, ie. includes/languages/english/YOUR_TEMPLATE/checkout_shipping.php). If you want to provide a link, you would change

define('TEXT_NO_SHIPPING_AVAILABLE','<span class="alert">Sorry, we are not shipping to your region at this time.</span><br />Please contact us for alternate arrangements.');

to

define('TEXT_NO_SHIPPING_AVAILABLE','<span class="alert">Sorry, we are not shipping to your region at this time.</span><br />Please <a href="index.php?main_page=contact_us">contact us</a> for alternate arrangements.');

Of course, you might wanna change the wording a bit so it says something like "At the moment, we're unable to calculate shipping costs for your region. Please contact us and we'll find a solution." Or something like that, use your imagination, but definitely change the original text because it will probably scare your intl customers away.

Keep in mind most customers want to get a shipping quote immediately so you might wanna consider setting up some alternative module and provide shipping quotes during checkout. You'll probably lose a great deal of your customers with this setup...

[michaeltw]

Thanks so much, that did the trick.

And thanks for the advice on limiting international orders, for right now though our product is primarily limited to US audiences so we're not sure if we want to get into internation orders at all.