drop shipper shipping

Shipping from a dropper is $10 per order reguardless of quantity. We also have inventory locally that we need to charge by weight. How do I setup shipping info for both? Is there a way to handle an order that contains both a products from the shipper and one locally? The shipping costs would need to be added up. For the life of me I can't figure this out.:yuck:

any ideas? anyone?

Say if you charge 1usd for 1lb (your inventory products), then set all the drop ship products weight to 10lb. And set ZC to not show the weight to users.

Yellow1912's onto something there.

We have the same problem, but our drop shipping fee isn't nearly that high.

Another thing you can do is setup a handling fee of $10 on all of your products. But have a sale on items you stock with $5 off. Unless of course your stock items are under $5 like many of mine are.

Hmmm, Maybe we can work out a mod where you can add a handling fee per product.

Is there some type of attrubute I can put on the items for a 1 time fee for certian drop shipped products? That way they incur the fee only once on certian prods?

I think I can use a Table Rate for this. How do I set a product to use a Table Rate I created? That should be simple.:unsure:

The problem is that Zen Cart isn't setup to assign a product to a certain shipping method. You activate a shipping method and it is available to all products.

All carts are setup that way. Which is why it's so hard to setup dropshipping.

If I knew what I was doing, the first thing I would do is allow products to be assigned to a certain shipping method only.

But then you run into the problem of someone ordering a dropshipped product and a stocked product at the same time. So you would need to set the system so that if 1 dropshipped item is ordered, then the whole order is to be dropshipped.

Does that make sense?

One simple solution:
Set up 2 shops, both can be under the same domain, same server, just different path.
Make it so that the drop ship site will appear on the other site like a category, and vice versa, state clearly to your customers that products from the 2 shops have to be ordered separately (because they will be shipped from 2 different locations and such...)

More complicated solution:
You have to rewrite the code, so that when the customers check out the shipping for each type of product is calculated differently and then add together, and possibly the tax as well.

I suggest you use Zone Rate Shipping. You can define 2 (or more) zones, one being local while the other being international. Define the shipping cost based on weight. For example, someone buys 3 products from 2 different drop shippers. Shipping should be 2x $10. However because most customers would not be willing to pay high shipping, you can incorporate part of the shipping cost to the product price. Zone Rate Shipping is similar to Table Rate Shipping but has more than one zones. You can set up in such a way that the higher the weight, the higher the shipping cost regardless of how many dropshippers customers are buying from. To make this look less expensive, the shipping for each additional item can costs just $3. Doing it this way, if customers buy 3 products from the same dropshipper, you will make a profit but if they buy from 3 different dropshippers, you will make less profit.

Hope this is helpful. Good luck.