Having one item that does not ship to other countries?

I am looking if something exists for zen cart...

I have a clothing store based in Canada and some manufacturers I order from are not allowed to have their product shipped to the US. I want to have some type of module that allows the user to see that "this item only ships to Canada" and to not allow them to check out with it if they are from a different country. Of course all of the other items should still be able to ship worldwide. I can put a notice in the item description that states that the item is only available in Canada, but that still won't stop people from other countries attempting to purchase it as well.

Is there something like this out there, or any suggestions on how I would make it work?

Since people can put items into their cart before logging in (or even before registering) it would require the Mind Reading mod, available in the Free Software Add Ons. (Just kidding. I haven't made it publically available yet.)

So you would have to wait until the checkout process starts, then use a conditional bit of code to check the country code (if not CA) and check the product ID #s and if there's a mis-match, pop up a warning. What you do at that point is up to you... cancel the whole order? auto-remove that one item form the cart? or something else?

Rob

^ It would be fine with just a "this item does not ship to your country. please remove it from your cart to continue checkout" warning or something in the shopping cart, and not allow that person to check out until they do so. Do you know how to do this? I'm not a programmer so I have no idea how I would even begin this.

The first thing you need is a way to identify the products that can only be shipped within Canada. There are a few ways you could do this, but all would need some sort of database modification to achieve, and either modifying the existing product entry/edit page or developing a new page in Admin. (For future upgradeability, I'd recommend adding a new database table and a new page in Admin)

Then you'd need code modifications for the shopping cart page to display a suitable advisory that there are products in the cart that are available to ship only within Canada.

Finally, you'd need to modify the checkout process with a custom function so that if they enter a shipping address outside Canada and one of those products is in the cart, they are redirected back to the shopping cart page.

Although most of the changes to the store-front side could use the override system, some would need to modify core files, making future upgrades a little more complex.