Idiot proofing products

Just upgraded to 1.3.9.f

I sell pet food. Some of the frozen items are too large to ship in coolers with dry ice. Some of them require next day or 2nd day shipping due to extreme perish-ability.

I'd like to be able to display the non shippable items in the cart so that local customers can see what we have available and or can order them for store pickup/home delivery only.

I would like to be able to force overnight/2nd day shipping for the highly perishable items only.

I've put notes in the product categories section and on the individual products themselves but people continue to order them incorrectly. This causes a lot of work for me communicating with the customers and or refunding orders.

Any idea? Do I need to have a special mod written?

You would really need a new field in the products table to flag the Products with these limitations that could then be used to test the orders and control the shipping methods that would work and perhaps alert the customer as to why these limitations are imposed ...

You could also add some Read Only Attributes to the Products that would flag these Products ...

ReadOnly Attributes only display on the Product _info page but do not act like true Attributes ... they are just there for information display and are not added to the cart ...

What is nice about them is that if you need to change the wording, you can change the wording in one place, the Option Value, and it would change on all Products that use them ...

But, yes, this is something that is really needing quite a bit of customization done to get the shipping modules more "intellegent" about the Products and how they can ship and to inform the customers about the limitations as they add Products to their shopping cart ...