Unique shipping rate per item?

I wonder if anyone can help me? I am about to launch a new book store and I am having problems getting my head around setting up the shipping charging :dontgetit.

I have had a look through the forum and can't find any questions/answers for this specific question. Please forgive me if I have missed it somewhere.

The books I will be selling will nearly all be drop shipped but from various suppliers. However these suppliers are located in different countries and have different shipping rates. I am at a loss as to how to incorporate this into my Zen Cart.

ie.

Book 1 costs 10 to ship to US and 25 to ship to UK (Supplier in US)
Book 2 costs 5 to ship to US and 35 to ship to UK (Supplier in US)
Book 2 costs 30 to ship to US and 5 to ship to UK (Supplier in UK)

The shipping costs are not related to weight and I basically want to be able to specify the shipping price individually for each item for each zone.

Can this be done in Zen Cart? If it can but is complex is there anywhere I can contact commercial programmers?

Please help. Thanks!

Mark.

I don't know of anything already available to support this, ... maybe somebody else knows something I don't.

If people only buy one book at a time, it can be achieved with just a little development work. Here are the things that would need to be done:

1. clone existing shipping modules for each supplier to reflect their rate card and use their location as the base instead of the store's location
2. add a new field to the product table to indicate which shipping module should be used for that book
3. update the admin pages used to maintain product data to allow the new field to be set and maintained
4. tweak the top level shipping module (the one that controls the process) to choose the specific shipping module indicated for the product chosen

However, that seems unlikely, in which case you would need to customize much more extensively the top level shipping module to look at all books in the visitors cart, recognize and aggregate packages from the same same supplier and differentiate them from other suppliers, and then add the totals together.

You can post requests for commercial help in the "Commercial Help Wanted" section of this forum.

Thanks, I'll look into that and try and give it a go.