Shipping Cost Based On Item Category With Discount Per Multiple Items In Category

Hello,

Using a freshly installed version 1.3.9h

I've been searching these forums and the mods for something that can lead me in the right direction to meet my clients shipping needs.

Basically, he's got six different product categories. He want to have a different rate based on the item type. Then three tiers of that rate, US, Canada and International. He also want to offer discounted shipping for each additional item purchased of the same type.

For example:
Product A - $5.00 US, $6.00 Canada, $8.00 Int For first item of A
Product B - $6.00 US, $7.00 Canada, $9.00 Int for first item of B
2nd item of A - $2.50 US, $3.00 Canada, $4.00 Int
2nd item of B - $3.00 US, $3.50 Canada, $4.50 Int
etc for Products C, D, E & F.

An order of 2 product A and 1 B would have a total of $13.50 for US ($5 + $2.50 A's, $6 B) and $21 Int ($8 + $4 A's, $9 B)

I've written the formula to handle this (I think). My issue is I'm getting overwhelmed by the code.

I'm decent with PHP and am working through the code of the various modules, but my head is starting to spin. I'm thinking I have to merge variants of the Zone and either items or tables modules to create my own custom one.

If anyone could point me in the right direction and offer any advice, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,
Cfen

Just wanted to give a quick update to possibly help out someone along the way.

Couldn't quite get what I needed. From checking out this forum, I don't think that it would be possible to properly set our shipping costs to be set to different zones based on category. Our issue comes because the difference between each zone is not the same for each category (Product A is $x for zone 1, $x * 2 for zone 2. Product B is $x for zone 1, $x * 3 for zone 2). Plus Canadian orders are just $1 more than domestic orders.

It looks like Ceon's Advanced Shipper Module would work perfectly. The shop owner however didn't want to spend the money at this point. So we decided to tweak the shipping rates slightly. We'll monitor how it's going and worth investing in later. If I was getting paid by the hour, it would have been well worth it, but it's not my decision.

What we did was set up three zones. US, Canada & International.

This tread was very useful in setting up the zones Zone Set Up Thread

Then we set domestic shipping to a flat rate regardless of order size. Most of our orders are for single items only and the owner thought it might promote some additional sales.

I then cloned the flat rate module and configured it for the Canadian zone and added $1 to the fee.

Then I set up the per unit by weight module for the International zone and set the weight of each category to what the shipping cost is.

Not exactly what we were shooting for, but it gets the job done for now.