Need help with pricing shipping from two sources

[Wolfmont]

OK, I bought the product. I have read the documentation. I've gotten a couple of support emails from Ceon.

I still don't understand how this thing works, or how it will help me to do what I need to do.

If anyone out there has actually used the Ceon Advanced Shipper program is willing to help me by answering a few questions, I'd be very grateful.

Anyway, to recap, here is what I need to do:

I sell books that may be shipped from any of many different sources, depending on the author or publisher. If someone orders books from multiple sources right now (say two books from one author and one from another), ZC automatically calculates the shipping as a single fee, based on the weight of the books. That won't work because each time a shipment is initiated into the postal system, there is a base charge. So, ZC may calculate the total shipping to be $4.50, but the actual fees incurred would be $7.50 because there are two actual shipments.

I need to be able to set up shipping so ZC is cognizant of the source of the shipments, and sets up separate shipping charges accordingly.

I considered building the shipping charges into the cost of each book, but that means if someone orders two books from the same source (author or publisher), they are overcharged.

Stevesh recommended Ceon Advanced Shipper, so I bought that, but I can't figure out how to make it work. Now that I have paid for it, it doesn't appear that it can do what I want it to do, unfortunately, and there are no refunds.

If someone can prove me wrong on that, and show me how to do what I need to do, I'd be very happy!

[Wolfmont]

With a combination of nudges from Ceon's tech support, blind luck, and reading the documentation, the Advanced Shipper now works as it should.

Nice, very nice, too!

Tony

[stevesh]

Stevesh recommended Ceon Advanced Shipper, so I bought that

For the record, I didn't recommend the Ceon module, just pointed out its availability. I haven't used it myself (yet).

Glad you got it set up and that it's doing the job for you.

[Wolfmont]

Yes, it's good, but the documentation is sort of arcane. With Conor's help (from Ceon), I managed to get it going. I've found the same problem for documentation with a few of the mods.

It seems that some of the people who write the mods write their instructions as though we are all starting from the same point of knowledge reference. For instance, I've tried a couple of the cross-sell mods and their documentation on how to set up the cross-sell jumps into a set of instructions in the middle, saying to modify this or that by typing a line of code into some file.

The problem is, I have no idea what files they are talking about, so I read and read, and get absolutely frustrated because even though it's obvious that the developer knew exactly what he or she was doing, they have no clue how to communicate that to the end user. Giving me directions that say "Turn right at the red light and go 1/2 mile, then turn left and you're there," may sound simple, but without some good directions as to how to get to that red light, the directions don't help very much. So, I still have no clue about how to set up the cross-selling.

I wrote tech manuals and tech training curricula for a long time, and I know that most developers have a knowledge set that is very different from most end users. Also, from working in that industry for years, I learned that most developers consider good documentation of how to use their product to be secondary, or maybe even tertiary, to simply developing the next product.