Shipping - Class of Service

[btldr123]

On our website we offer lots of made to order products, and many of these products include p&p, over the years we have added many stock items ad shipping was priced on weight, and we only offered 2nd class, many customers wanted stock items sent 1st class or next day

So this year we changed our shipping charges, and have set up 4 shipping choices, and the default is the "made to order products" which is free, over the last few weeks,a majority of customers ordering stock items, have not chosen the correct shipping option for stock items, so orders are being processed with "made to order" shipping option, so we are having to contact customers for shipping costs, does anyone have any tips or advise on how I can make the shipping option more obvious to customers, without setting the default to 2nd class costs, as this may cause confusion to customers who are ordering made to order?

Many Thanks

[leehack]

The KB and AUG have the custom code to display the choices as radio buttons, i'd suggest that.

[btldr123]

Thanks for the reply, not being very techie, not sure what KB or AUG means, where will I find this info to make the changes.

[Mike Hughes]

The most flexible way is to use shipping by weight.

This way you can assign different weights to different products and get the checkout to automatically offer the correct shipping options.

Mike

[leehack]

AUG = Advanced User Guide
KB = KnowledgeBase

[vistamaster]

I think i've got an opposite situation here, but it relates to the topic lol ...

Basically what I want is to hide unnecessary shipping options.

My situation:

I use shipping charges by weight, say

<= 1.25 Kg - £5 - Don't allow excess
<= 30 Kg - £10 - Don't allow excess
<= 250 Kg - £45 - Don't allow excess
<= 500 Kg - £50 - Don't allow excess
<= 1000 Kg - £60 - Highest table value

Now e.g. if customers order weight falls below 1.25 Kg he/she sees all the shipping classes in the checkout and I want him/her to only see the one that applies to his/her order which is <= 1.25 Kg - £x.xx

i wouldn't mind other classes to be there, but it does look scarry if order value is say £10 :-)

[Mike Hughes]

Is there a reason for the different classes? Are they pretty much sent the same way, just at different costs?

If so, then these should all just be different price bands in the one shipping class rather than different classes (and the customer will just be shown the one that is releveant to them).

Mike

[leehack]

I can't fathom why you have 5 shipping classes, why can't you have all of those tiers in one shipping class? Seems well over engineered to me.

[vistamaster]

thanks for your prompt reply, yes the orders are sent via different services such as

< 1.25 kg Packet - via royal mail
< 30 kg Parcel via courier
< 250 kg - quarter pallet via 1st haulage company
< 500 kg - half pallet via 2nd haulage company
< 1000 kg - full pallet via 3rd haulage company

to separate thos classes is issential as it will show to us right away through which carrier the order should go. No need to check order weight which is not even shown on a packing list that makes order processing even more difficult. So i decided to separate shipping classes to reduce time for order processing.

[Mike Hughes]

I wondered if this was the case.

Actinic displays all the valid shipping classes to the customer so this can't be done out of the box.

The only way to do this would be to write some javascript to check the shipping weight and then just display the option you want the customer to see.

Mike

[leehack]

I can see why you have done this, but i think your thinking is a little wrong. You've complicated your website and thus for you users, so that your back office operation is easier. I think your focus needs to be on your website and then do what you can back office wise.

Duncan and Jan both do custom reports and Jan has an addon that colours orders according to certain criteria, why not take a look at either getting a custom packing list created (could be as low as £50) or better still use the colouring plugin and possibly remove the need to print a packing list each time?

You'll be able to process orders as error free as before and your customers can order as simple as possible.

You won't get the system to hide options that are options to use on the order, think of the system offering a 24-hour service as well as a normal option, it would always have to show the most expensive options as well. Your best option is to make the cheapest the first option, so if people do look at the list, they see that they have the cheapest.

[vistamaster]

ok, I've followed your suggestion & merged all 5 delivery classes into one. But, there is always one BUT... now because I only ship to UK & have only one class the delivery charge is not showing on the checkout page...

any ideas?

[vistamaster]

OK, ive managed to display shipping class even when there's only one available.

not sure if ive done the right thing and didn't damage something else i just used my intuitivity lol

in ActinicOrder.pm ive played around and got it working. Can someone check and confirm that i did it correctly or provide the correct solution please?

			# $Response[10] can be -1 which indicates simple shipping
			# in this case the shipping cannot be hidden
			#
			if ($Response[10] == 0)						# there are no shipping methods
				{
				return($::TRUE);							# do not check further just hide
				}
			if (($Response[10] == 1) &&				# there is just one shipping method
				  ACTINIC::IsPromptHidden(2,1))		# and the user defined prompt is hidden
				{
				return($::TRUE); IVE CHANGED THIS TO FALSE							# do not check further just hide
				}
			return($::FALSE);								# do not hide
			}