8.5.0 Category Shipping

[Waggers]

I've set up a trial store with two products. One is in the ‘default’ category with a £4.25 fixed carriage charge and the other in a 'heavy' category at £8.50.


The help file states:

If a customer orders a product from more than one category, they won't have to pay more than one 'fixed cost'. Only the largest 'fixed cost' will be applied to the order.

However, I've just tried this and it seems to be adding the two fixed costs together. I've purchased both items I get a shipping charge of £12.75.

Is the help file wrong or could I be doing something stupid?!

Richard

[Darren B]

Oh dear

I was hoping this was going to help me, i do not use weight but length and wanted it to use the biggest (longest) and not the sum of them same thing just change the words.

I shall play with mine and see how we go, if anyone has any ideas then 2 of us need help

cheers
Darren

[fleetwood]

May be worth checking that you haven't ticked 'ship seperately' in one or either of the products in question.

[cdicken]

Richard - could you email the beta address with this please? mailto:v850beta@actinic.co.uk?Subject=v850_Beta

As well as checking whether 'ship separately' is ticked, make sure you have not entered anything in the 'Per Item' charge for either category as this will be applied once for each item in the shopping cart (as well as a single fixed charge being applied).

Gosh this stuff is complicated.

Darren - with regards to your 'Length' issue, I'm not sure that the Volumetric shipping options are going to help you out. You can set the calculation basis to 'Maximum Weight' and this will compare the weight of the order to the volume of the order, and base the calculation charge on whatever is larger - but if you were to use 'length' instead of 'volume' it would still calculate shipping based on the 'total length' of the order - rather than just the length of the longest item.

[Waggers]

Okey-dokey Chris,

Everything looks as it should (no separate shipping and no 'per item') so I'll e-mail the boys & girls in the beta team!

Richard

[Darren B]

Hi Chris

I have set this up differently to volumetric, i set it up as follows

Under my UK zone i have created 2 classes as follows

1) England & Wales
2) England & Wales in Post Codes NE CA PL TR SA LD LL

Then i created 4 catagories as follows
under 1M
1M to 3M
3M to 5M
5M and over

Then for each catagory i created the correct charge for option 1) and option 2) for each catagory.
For example under 1M is £7.95 for option 1) and £17.95 for option 2) 1M to 3M is £19.95 for option 1) and £29.95 for option 2) and so on

Now this i thought should of worked but the site fails with script errors, i have sent these to the beta team and there is another thread on here but what i wondered is do you see why this might not work, i can see no reason, once the script is fixed this should be the correct way to set it up?

Cheers
Darren

[bentleybloke]

"Shipping Category" would be far more useful if it could be used to exclude items from certain shipping classes. i.e. used in conjunction with weight/volume based shipping calculations.

[cdicken]

Darren

Your setup looks fine. Hopefully the beta team will be able to do something with your snapshot.

Jonathan - there is an 'exclude from shipping calculation' checkbox on products now that can exclude them from having a charge calculated. You can then just enter a specific shipping charge for that product if you wanted to, or else leave the product as being free.

[bentleybloke]

there is an 'exclude from shipping calculation' checkbox on products now that can exclude them from having a charge calculated.

Thanks, but that doesn't work very well if you're shipping worldwide.

[cdicken]

Thanks, but that doesn't work very well if you're shipping worldwide.

I'm afraid I'm not 100% sure of your requirements.

You can also have different shipping methods for different classes if that's any use.

Maybe if you desscribe the way you want to ship, I can see whether we can model it in 8.5.

[Krithika]

Richard:

The extra £4.25 is coming from the Shipping Supplement specified for the Kent Edition product. Once I removed that, Actinic correctly charged £8.50 alone, which is the fixed charge for the Paper Category.

Hope this helps.

[bentleybloke]

Thanks Chris,

I decided to take a bit of a step back and see if my shipping model is too complicated for automation I think I can get something to work with the new features. However, what I wanted to do was this:

Use the categories in conjunction with total weight to create exclusions for shipping products. Lets say I am selling a 8kg widget which is 2m long, some books and some keyrings. I ship the books out at a subsidised cost of 2.50 per book upto an order value of 30.00 after which shipping the books is free. The widget, being 2m long can't be sent using my regular carrier, Parcelforce so it has to be sent using Citylink who then volume the package and charge me for sending 45kg. The keyrings just go in the Royalsnail and probably get lost anyway, but are charged at the 1st class parcel rate.

I'm also accepting orders internationally and can't send the 2m long widget with any of my couriers, so wish to exclude this from international shipping. The books are sent out with shipping charges based on weight.

Now I have set up the following categories (in addition to default) "Book" and "UK Only". If I'm using categories in the Zone/Class table either a charge per item can be used or a fixed price for n number of items in that category.

What is missing to achieve this is a check box on the Category Table to exclude the shipping category from fixed pricing. This checkbox needs to work in the same was as when a product in say the book category is ordered internationally and there is no category pricing defined for the zone. The shipping calculation then trips over to whichever weight/vol based class is valid.

Hope that makes sense.

Something for the shipping wishlist:

Like with the discounting, where it tells you in the cart that if you buy one more item from group X you will get n% off or Z free, it would be a good addition to have an automated phrase "Spend £ more to qualify for free shipping".

[cdicken]

see if my shipping model is too complicated for automation

I think that might be slightly too complicated for manual operation as well.

Can I just clarify your wish list requirement - are you asking for a 'fall-back' shipping method for each Category if a certain set of criteria are met?

[bentleybloke]

I think that might be slightly too complicated for manual operation as well.

Mensa are adding it to their puzzle book.

are you asking for a 'fall-back' shipping method for each Category if a certain set of criteria are met?

Sort of, yes. More 'override' than 'fall-back'. So the shipping of selected categories can be calculated on a weight basis.

Also, in the event a customer abroad has added a UK only item to the cart, an error message saying which product cannot be exported would be handy too.

[cdicken]

OK Jonathan - makes sense

I've passed these two requests on to the team.