Any way to specify £2 for 1st item, 30p additional item?

Here's my problem:

I am selling 7 inch and 12 inch records. A 7 inch record costs about £1.20 in postage. Two 7 inch records cost £1.50.

Yes, I can set this up in ZC by using a handling charge of £0.90 and setting the rate for each item to £0.30.

But that only works for 7 inch records.

A 12 inch record costs about £2.95 to post, with £0.60 incremental rises thereafter.

So I need to be able to specify a base rate with incremental rises for 7 inch records and a seperate base rate with incremental rises for 12 inch records.

Is this possible? I have read through everything but as far as I can tell there is no way to do this.

Can't even sell by weight due to the Royal Mail's ridiculously overcomplicated sizing system.

Any help here much appreciated as I am on the brink of uninstalling and trying another cart.

People really are going to think I have shares in this!! What you need is the Advanced Shipper module from Ceon.net - it will cost you as it's a commercial offering, but it will save you hours of effort and frustration.

£50! There goes my first year's profit then.

Seriously, is there any way I can do this within Zen or not. I know a bit of PHP so I don't mind getting my hands dirty if someone can point me in the right direction.

Alternatively, does anyone know if any of the myriad other carts out there provide a shipping system that is not so restrictive as Zen's?

OK after much hunting around I have found an alternative. Should anyone else need a shipping method similar to the one I have outlined above, there is an alternative free cart out there which won't cost an exhorbitant £50 to modify...

I probably shouldn't tell you which one it is, that would be just too SQUARE... :P

stevenw:

which won't cost an exhorbitant £50 to modify...

Interesting approach - you just spent another hour or more of your time hunting, you are now about to spend several hours more setting up in spite of the several hours you must already have spent on ZenCart...how much is your own time worth?

And whatever open source software you use, if you want it to do something that it doesn't already do and there is no free add-on available that fits the bill, you either modify it yourself if you have the necessary skills, or pay someone to do it.

Incidentally, no-one here minds you mentioning other carts by name! Nobody here starts flaming over that! :wink:

Yeah, I know where you're coming from, but fortunately for me the shipping aspect was the first thing I checked out. I somehow suspected that it might give me a problem.

As it turns out, I may indeed end up paying the £50 for this mod. The alternative cart I mentioned is pretty good but I'd have to pay an equivalent amount to get the copyright notice removed (I could remove it myself but I don't especially want to go to court neither do I believe in stealing someone else's hard work).

So there's my comeuppance for being smug.

The jury's still out on which software I go for. Am beginning to get a little bit worried by the "hacking" sections and comments on here, but I guess that's par for the course?

Thanks for that link anyway Ryk - you might get my £50 after all!

stevenw:

Can't even sell by weight due to the Royal Mail's ridiculously overcomplicated sizing system.

I disagree... I have set up several sites where RM is the shipper for items that can be large or small. It sometimes takes making FOUR CLONES of zonetables module (to cater for UK postal zones and differing weights for letters, large letters and packets / parcels) but you can set up your modules to handle weight - based on the data you find

HERE

and

HERE

Thanks for that link anyway Ryk - you might get my £50 after all!
As far as am aware, Ryk is in no way connected to ceon.net

Thank you misty, quite correct - although I don't deny I know Conor of ceon...in fact, we even met for a Guinness (or 3!) in a bar in Dublin a couple of years ago and we (at JSWEb) often make use of his services. If I was after making money out of you stevenw, in the first instance I'd have pointed you to our site, not to ceon.

This sort of thing is always difficult in a forum like this and especially where the basic code is Open Source, but this is one of those occasions where the best tool available happens (unfortunately) to be something that has to be paid for.

And the reality is that anyone in the UK who wants to differentiate delivery by postcode (never mind anything a little more advanced like your requirements) actually needs this module - or to spend hours trying to clone existing ones (see schoolboy's post above) or alternatively, spend a heck of a lot more on a personal customisation.

Ryk:

Thank you misty, quite correct - although I don't deny I know Conor of ceon...in fact, we even met for a Guinness (or 3!) in a bar in Dublin a couple of years ago and we (at JSWEb) often make use of his services. If I was after making money out of you stevenw, in the first instance I'd have pointed you to our site, not to ceon.

This sort of thing is always difficult in a forum like this and especially where the basic code is Open Source, but this is one of those occasions where the best tool available happens (unfortunately) to be something that has to be paid for.

And the reality is that anyone in the UK who wants to differentiate delivery by postcode (never mind anything a little more advanced like your requirements) actually needs this module - or to spend hours trying to clone existing ones (see schoolboy's post above) or alternatively, spend a heck of a lot more on a personal customisation.

Rick is quite correct... I'm lucky in that the hard work to get the essentials of a UK Postal Service system for zc, was done some time ago, and I apply it when clients are tight-fisted and don't want to fork out that £50 snippet that Conor charges for his mod.

I actually collaborated with Conor on this mod some years ago when it was being developed as REGION TABLES.. When I say "collaborated", I gave him a useful link to a site that had done a lot of work on geo-location software...

Anyway... with Advanced Shipping mod ALL your shipping challenges will be resolved...

I look at it this way...

Let's say your time is worth £20 / hour.

Your original post is now 20 hours old and you are NO CLOSER to a solution.

You will probably spend a total of 8 to 10 hours trying to find/build a solution, so you will end up spending £150 - £200 in opportunity cost.

Just get hold of Conor's mod...

(PS: I also do not have shares in CEON) :D

Oh come on. I'm worth much more than £20 an hour.

Thing is, this is a semi-hobby site I'm tinkering with. I really won't sell much more than £50 worth of stuff probably ever :( so I'm loathe to pay that for a flipping postal mod.

stevenw:

Oh come on. I'm worth much more than £20 an hour.

Thing is, this is a semi-hobby site I'm tinkering with. I really won't sell much more than £50 worth of stuff probably ever :( so I'm loathe to pay that for a flipping postal mod.

To dismiss Connor's work as a "flipping postal mod" is a little unfair. He spent hundreds of hours perfecting this tool and is (I believe) fully justified in offering it for sale at what is really a nominal amount of money. Connor has many free contributions too which he readliy makes available to the community, along with expert advice and help.

Anyway... As I mentioned earlier, it is quite possible to create a shipping function for Royal Mail that handles packets and parcels. If I look back on the work I did on my RM functions, I think I invested about 4 to 6 hours in total. (PS: it helped having Kev Polley's UK Template Module, which configures a standard install of ZC into a UK-Compliant website - correct counties, correct date formatting, correct zone defines, correct spelling conventions, correct weight formats... Once this mod was in place, configuring UK shipping via the myriad of RM options was made much easier).

Golly, we are sensitive. I apologise for calling it a "flipping" postal mod. But - and it's a big but - when you look at the comparative cost of postal mods for Cubecart, £50 is waaay to much. I don't doubt for one minute that a lot of work has gone into this mod, but, let me tell you, I wouldn't have hesitated to stump up £20 for it (even though £20 is still more than Estelle's Cubecart postal mods). £50 is a big time off-putter.

But that's just my opinion. I don't mean to cause offence to all those who are in cahoots with this particular developer.

Finally - say this mod WAS £20. I would have bought it and used it and thought nothing more of it. As it stands, the cost put me off to such a degree that I actually knocked up a workaround of my own yesterday afternoon. It may not be as comprehensive as the £50 alternative, but it does what I want it to do.

Perhaps I should put it up for sale... At £49.99 :P

Hey Steven

I realise that you may not mean to sound offensive, but the tone of your posts indicates that you resent the fact that some people are offering complex solutions for a small fee.

When you have been working with this software for as long as some of us have been, you get to appreciate the high degree of input (time and skill) that is often required to provide quick and easy solutions for complex challenges faced by our community of users.

Some people are philanthroipc enough to devote their time and skill to solutions which they then make freely available. Other people have used time which could perhaps have been devoted to commercial gain, and they then offer their handiwork at a price.

Rick Suffolk and I have been configuring zencarts for people for many years - people who have a serious commercial intent for their webshops - and we know when it is appropriate to suggest to our clients that they are better off stumping up a few more pounds for a solution that's already available, rather than to have us re-invent the wheel for what could be an even higher price.

As I said earlier, your shipping needs can be configured using a number of methods - those methods being based on the large array of free modules on offer. So what you want is actually there for the taking - if you are prepared to do the (relatively simple) adaptations yourself, then you won't need to spend any money at all.

Rick and I were just pointing out that Connor's mod is a wheel that's already been invented... we were not insisting that you avail yourself of it.

There are nearly a million posts on this forum, of which about two-thirds are solutions to various challenges. I have put up a large number of help posts relating to shipping and if you dig these out, you'll probably be well on your way to configuring your shipping...

BTW, there is a UK Royal Mail module in the downloads area. Why not try that one... it is (afterall) free...

schoolboy:

...Rick Suffolk and I have been configuring zencarts for people for many years - people who have a serious commercial intent for their webshops - and we know when it is appropriate to suggest to our clients that they are better off stumping up a few more pounds for a solution that's already available, rather than to have us re-invent the wheel for what could be an even higher price...

I consider myself told orf sah! I bow in deference to your greater knowledge of this subject. Your Modshops portfolio clearly demonstrates your abundant skill in this area :smile:

I certainly hope you charge a suitably high rate for such cutting-edge work. There is a lot to be said for inline styles, table-based design, and image-based navigation in spite of what everyone says.

Hey, I loved 1999 too!

Hey Steve... Now I'm sounding prescriptive... Sorry...

I actually helped someone a few years ago set up a zencart selling old Vinyls (they had a garage full of them) and they were happily using RM to deliver.

I haven't been in touch with them since Oct 2007 so I don't know how things are going. They did tell me that as soon as they'd flogged off their "stock" they'd close up the shop. But they were doing about £400 - £500 a week by the time I lost touch.

Some of their records were quite rare and they were initially offering these at £1.50 until I stepped in and suggested they raise prices on the rare stuff.