Crazy shipping

Right. Apparantly, my shipping needs to work like this.

The vast majority of products all have a £5 shipping charge(Lets call it item A), and even if you buy 6, or how ever many, the shipping stays at £5. Some other products have a £11 charge (say item B) which is charged per item. So if you buy 3 of item B at £11 postage is will cost £33. If you buy 3 of B and 1 of A, it would be £33 + £5 = £38. If you were to buy 3 of B and 2 of A, it would still be £33 + £5.

If that made any sense to anyone and there is a way to make this work, I'd be very grateful to know how. Although I'm not holding out much hope!

I've been thinking, maybe the best way would be to have a £5 flat rate shipping charge on everything and then for item B just add the shipping cost to the price of the product and set it to ship for free. But that really seems like a dodgy way round of doing it and I don't like the idea of some items price including shipping and some not. If there is a better way out there i'm still open to suggestions but if it is practically impossible let me know and I'll go ahead with this method.

There's no built-in support to allow separate-shipping-rates-per-product.
It could be added by changing the database to require that you store shipping rates for each product (more admin work), and then using those to calculate final amounts. But that doesn't work when the product has one rate regardless of quantity. You'd almost need to have two shipping modules: one for type A rates and another for type B calcs. Then set each product (in database again) to use one module or the other. Then checkout gets very harried though ... wow.

Is there an average shipping cost you could apply to all products that would cover costs and not be confusing or discouraging to the customer? (just another strategy)

Thanks for clearing that up for me. The store owner is happy to go with the work around I mentioned above... which saves me some hassle I suppose.

Thanks again.

Oh dear, new problem. I've set a £5 flat rate shipping cost for everything, and I've set my set of £11 shipping products as 'always free shipping'. When i tested buying a normal product it's fine, but when I try buying a product set to free shipping on it's own I can't get past step 1 of the checkout. This product is one of the problems. http://www.cotswood-doors.co.uk/catalog/glasurit-glassodecor-hl-afrormosia-p-449.html
If you need to sign up to test it please do, the store is not live yet. Ooer.

I'm an idiot. I didn't have the free shipping module installed. I'm done!