Shipping from multiple warehouses across USA

We are in the process of setting up multiple product
distribution points across the USA.

For example.. New Jersey and California

I would like to divide up the country, states west of the missippie
will ship from CA, states east will ship from NJ.

I would like zencart to use different "from" addresses so
shipping is caculated correctly depending on where the person
lives.

Can zencart do this out of the box? How could I go about
configuring it?

Thanks,
Mike

No, I dont think it can do that out of the box. You will have to check if there is any module available for that.

The usual question asked here is: what happens when a customer east of the Mississippi orders products from both warehouses?

To make something like this (AKA "the Dropshipper's Paradox") work, you'd need to essentially create two separate orders when the above situation occurs. Lots of custom coding.

I am in need of the same set up. I have two warehouses. Each warehouse (one West coast and one East Coast) carries all the items we sell. So the issue of a customer ordering something that one warehouse does not have won't come up. I haven't found a shipping module that works with this. I too would like to have the customer get the correct shipping charges when ordering. We have a lot of East Coast orders that aren't completed (ie: carts are left) because the shipping costs are too high when in reality, they are much lower. Anyone have/know of a module that can work with our needs?

You would need to customize your own shipping modules ...

In a perfect world ... what method of shipping would you use from the East Coast? and from the West Coast?

I know for me, we use UPS only in both warehouses and offer ground and expedited

Because both the East and West warehouses have all of the same products ...

You could clone the UPS shipping module for the east and west and then build zones for each of them ...

Then customize the code that instead on using the Store shipping information that you use the East or West warehouse information ...

Now the East or the West warehouse ups module opens based on shipping address and the better rates can be quoted ...

Thats a good idea Ajeh. So basically behind the scenes.. even
in the shipping estimator, you would need to

1. figure out what products in the cart are avaliable from what
   warehouses. Product attribute? some sort of multiple select
   box?

2. get the shipping address for the warehouses involved. New
   db table and admin tool?

3. determine which warehouse that has the product is closest
   to the user's zip. As the bird flies distance? A new generic
   distance caculating function using a zip code distance DB?

4. determine the weight and box sizes of each chunk of their
   order

5. make a multiple calls to each shipping method, 1 for each
   chunk of the order using the closest warehouse to the user.

   I would think to keep it simple for the user you would need to
   allow the user to select only one shipping method per order..
   UPS, fedex, etc. I dont think you want to tell the customer that
   1/2 of their order is coming via UPS from CA and the other
   1/2 is coming via Fedex in NJ. That would be very confusing.

6. add up all the costs and present to the user

7. After checkout.. we would need to maintain an
   inventorys of each product in each warehouse.

Ideally any module that is written would need to support
as many warehouses as necessary and a product in some or
all of the warehouses.

I can see how this module might be a lot of work but it would
benefit a lot of people.. especially drop ship folks who are forced
make concessions, eat shipping costs and use flat rate.

Mike

No ... actually I thought you said ALL products are available from both the East and the West warehouses and you just needed to know which warehouse to use as the Ship From ... this is not a hard project to write you just have to be very careful in attempting to build the clones on UPS ... :smile:

If you need to determine what Products to send from which warehouse and obtain the shipping for the East Products and the West Products then you will need to really do some heavy customization to get a quote from the two sets of products and the two warehouses and combine them to create the total shipping ... this is not a fun project to write ... :unsure:

So for clarification ... are ALL products available from Both the East and West warehouse ... or ... are Some Products available only at the East warehouse and Some Products available only at the West warehouse ... :unsure:

Actually I am the original poster.. and in my case..

some are avaliable from our west coast location
and some are avaliable from our east coast location only.

Mike

For you, malice95, you are in for a lot of work to manage this and get things working ... let us know how you do ... :smile:

Just to add my 2 cents here- A module that would be a solution to the scenarios depicted here ***Really Is Needed ***by quite a few Zen Cart owners (yours truly included). There are plenty of threads that decry what someone else above called "the Drop shipper’s Paradox" (very appropriate moniker of the problem).

The only viable solution I've seen is a 'Pay For' Module (not free) that is lately at around $68.00 given the current rate of exchange (British Developer has it priced at £47.50).

I haven't tried it personally as I'm still hoping to find a less "do everything imaginable" solution (and a free one would be nice) but I have seen others sing it's praises. That 's why I mention it- maybe others will be helped. It's at http://dev.ceon.net/

For my purposes, all I need is to be able to charge one set of products on a flat scale (product cost $0 to $10.00: will have a shipping rate of $5.95, $10.01 to $20.00 will have a shipping rate of $6.95, etc.) while still being able to charge my FedEx calculated (by weight) rates for all other items. Anyone have any ideas? I'm no programmer but it doesn't seem like it should be so difficult (i.e. Zen Cart's one size fits all way of doing shipping). But again- I have no knowledge- maybe it's *very *difficult. Thoughts?

Thanks Ajeh! I"m not sure I am technical enough to figure out how to do the UPS clone. I'm afraid of crashing my store. I'll have to try to play with it some. I appreciate your advise.

It would be nice in the future is a module could be made for this since obviously, I'm not the only one with this need. Thanks!

Hi Ajeh,

Could you explain a little on how to Clone the modules? I am using FedEx on 1.3.7 and would like to have two shipping-from addresses i.e., from Canada and USA.

I tried copying the two modules and renaming them but started getting error 'cannot redeclare fedex class. ..', so i changed the names of the class and function from fedexground to fedexgroundusa, and same for express. However, i cannot see the install option in admin.

Can you please guide?

Regards
Farhan

You might do a search on:
clone flat
clone item

to give you some examples on cloning the shipping modules ...

check out ceon's advanced shipper module. we use it for drop shipping from multiple vendors and it is excellent. it's so flexible that it will work for any shipping scenario that you can imagine, and all scenarios discussed in this thread are easily configured right out of the box. if you need any customization done to it the author is great and extremely reasonable with his rate. I would recommend this 100% to anyone and frankly this module should be a part of the core code since it is incredibly flexible and very very easy to configure.

THANK YOU SO much! I just emailed the Ceon Dev asking about MY specific situation. Yes a freebie would be nice, but bottom line, if it does what my client needs then it's totally worth it - will update when I hear back!

Ceon got RIGHT back to me - answering all of my questions in a detailed manner - :clap:very nice people - I am going to purchase and configure in the week - will update!

If you have all products in both warehouse, I think it's job of you warehouse, not zen cart.