Create a surcharge for customers in certain areas

[Essentially]

We are looking to ship a fresh item that needs to be delivered fast. We are selling this product including P&P, but for customers in certain areas we'll need to use a special fast service. How can I add an extra cost to customers in certain areas for this specific product. For now I have done this in the shipping zone/class table, but I dont want the extra cost to apply to additional items beside this product.

[Mike Hughes]

The way I'd do it is to use shipping by weight and set those specific products to have an exceptional weight. Then all you need to do is create the zone / class of shipping that's unique for that weight of products.

[Essentially]

Hi Mike, thanks for the reply. Your suggestion is similar to how I have done it for now too, which works fine for orders of that product only. But when other products are added to the cart besides the specific product, I would want to ship them separately and so have a combination of the extra shipping charge and a standard charge for the other items.This is the bit where I'm stuck really. Can products have a different supplement per zone?

[Mike Hughes]

Possibly? I only ever use shipping by weight as that works fine for me. I think what you want might be possible using the 'ship product separately' box but I have to admit I've never got into the details of Sellerdeck shipping other than the features I use myself. I know there are certain features and functions that only work with some of the shipping options.

[Essentially]

Thanks Mike, hopefully Sellerdeck support will get round to replying! I've got the 'Ship Separately' box ticked, but on testing it doesn't seem to do anything at checkout. Have been reading about creating a Category and seeing if that will work, somehow, but I think this might have to wait for a fresh head on Monday!

[brucet]

As far as I can tell, 'Ship Separately' for a product has no effect on the shipping cost. It just results in the item being assigned to a different package in Order Packaging (in the order 'Shipping and Handling' tab).

You could look at Category-based shipping. See the article 'How can I charge shipping based on the type of product being sent?' in the main help. It allows you to set an overall charge for each Category, plus a separate charge per item, for each Shipping Zone. However, you can't combine this with weight-based shipping, and you can't create a sliding scale of charges for different quantities (such as 1-5 items = £1, 5-10 items = £2 etc).

Probably you will need to adopt some simplification of the shipping charges, so that some customers pay a little more than the actual shipping cost, and some a little less, but you cover your costs overall. That's how most companies handle complex shipping TBH - Amazon included. Consumers actually prefer that. They don't like complicated shipping charges; and in the long run, the cost evens out for them as well as for you.

If you really need much finer control of shipping costs, Sellerdeck Cloud uses a rules-based approach to shipping that can handle more complex configurations. The offset is that it's more complicated to set up.