Shipping based on mileage

[spangle]

Hi all,

I'd like to work out shipping costs based on mileage from our depot to the customers location as all of our deliveries will be by courier who will charge us by the mile.

Does anyone have any experience of such a shipping method in Actinic?

I've noticed that Postcode Anywhere have a Distance and Directions calculator which is worked out between two postcode locations. Something like this would be perfect if I could figure out how to integrate it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

[Mike Hughes]

This isn't going to be easy:

In essence you need to:

1. Calculate the distance.
2. Use this to either define a shipping band or add a 'shipping' product.

AFAIK neither of these capabilities are available in Actinic so will have to be developed as custom functions.

Do you want shipping costs to be a number of bands such as <10 miles, 10-25 miles, 25 - 50 miles, etc or will it be 17p per mile (or whatever)? The only real difference is whether you try to use Actinic's shipping tables or not.

Mike

[leehack]

I can see the appeal of this sort of charging matrix, sadly in Actinic this sort of thing is a pipe dream and never going to be realistically possible, too many variables involved.

The one ounce of hope is exploring the Javascript country state maps feature they added in v10, heaven knows what it does, i'm not even sure they know tbh (answers were somewhat sketchy when i first asked), it's never been mentioned, but it might be worth 4 seconds of investigation.

[Mike Hughes]

The one ounce of hope is exploring the Javascript country state maps feature they added in v10, heaven knows what it does, i'm not even sure they know tbh (answers were somewhat sketchy when i first asked), it's never been mentioned, but it might be worth 4 seconds of investigation.

Go on, admit it. You made this up didn't you.

Didn't you?

Mike

[leehack]

No Mike, it is there in v10 i assure you. Settings > site options > properties.

I mentioned on the very first alpha testing of V10 that there seemed to be no inbuilt help on this feature, in 10.0.3 that situation doesn't seem to have changed, like i say some ghost added this, because noone knows about it. I'm presuming it's a US feature of some kind.

[NormanRouxel]

Assuming you can make a calculation of the distance, you could (with a little Perl tweaking) use this to override the overall shipping weight. Thus you'd be able to use the weight table as a distance one.

[spangle]

Hi guys,

Many thanks for the replies.

Mike, yes in this instance we'd be sticking with a fixed price of Xp per mile for all deliveries rather than a variable price per region. I don't know if this makes it any less complex? I'm suspecting not really in the grand scheme of things.

The country state maps sound like they could be US related. I know that Google, for example, offer a geographical delivery matrix based on milage using a similar map process. I looked into this originally with Google but alas it is only offered in the US and not the rest of the world. Could be a similar thing with Actinic perhaps. I might check it out anyway Lee as you've mentioned it. Support may have to come from some kind of spiritual intervention though by the sounds!

Thanks for the idea Norman. Sounds theoretically feasible. Overall you've all seemed to suggest it is going to be pretty complex to put together. I like the idea of potentially reusing features so this may be a route to check out first. I may find I need to buy in some Actinic expertise ultimately though to help make it happen.