Free Delivery on Product

[Dybbuk]

Hello,

I'm trying to set up free delivery on a single product, where shipping is calculated by quantity. I know there is a simple method of doing this for weight calculated shipping, but that's not really an option for the client.

I have tried several workarounds including selling the product (membership) as a digital download, but that doesn't work at all - shipping is still charged and a javascript error results in no download option. So it's likely that I have this set up incorrectly, but I'm not sure it will be a viable fix anyway.

What I really need to know is if I can apply free shipping to a product with shipping calculated by quantity.

DB

[swee]

Hi,

Same here! Problems regarding the Shipping! I also want FREE delivery for a particular product and also want it to be limited to certain freight forwarders. How could it be done?

With Regards,
Swee

[Dybbuk]

Not that I'm griping, but for an e-commerce program in its 7th build to have neither a generic "forgotten password" function nor standardised "free delivery" option is a bit curious.

It would be nice to have a big fat, red button next to a product that asks "provide free delivery". I mean, the 0 weight method is fine if you're doing it that way, but not really sufficient for most needs.

Is there a fix, method or workaround for this that I'm not seeing?

DB

[timslatter]

Delivery/Collection

We have big problems with Actinics Shipping module as well. Most of our customers still opt for free collection from one of our branches rather than paying £12.50 delivery to within the M25 region. We have to use delivery/collection as a component choice which means if a customer does buy two cakes (which is rare in our line of business of selling birthday cakes) the customer will be charged delivery twice.
Can anyone help?!
Tim
www.thecakestore.com

[TraceyG]

Hi,

I'll try to answer all your questions in turn:

Dybbuk - What I really need to know is if I can apply free shipping to a product with shipping calculated by quantity.

I'm afraid not - this can only be done by using the weight method. I have posted your comments to our development team.

Swee - Same here! Problems regarding the Shipping! I also want FREE delivery for a particular product and also want it to be limited to certain freight forwarders. How could it be done?

I have replied to your thread at http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=10167

Tim - We have to use delivery/collection as a component choice which means if a customer does buy two cakes (which is rare in our line of business of selling birthday cakes) the customer will be charged delivery twice.

I take it that you are only delivering within the UK. If so then the following may help you. However, please note that if you use HSBC as a PSP or are transferring your orders to Sage, it probably won't work.

1) In 'Advanced | Locations' create a new location for 'Collection'. Give it a unique code (3 letters will definitely be unique).

Click 'Apply' and 'OK'.

2) In 'View | Business Settings | Shipping & Handling tab' set it to 'Advanced Shipping' and shipping by 'Quantity' (you could use any of the other options depending on how your shipping is worked out).

3) Set up a zone for the UK and add 'United Kingdom' then set up a zone for 'Collection' and add 'Collection'to it.

4) Add a class to both of these zones called something like 'Standard Shipping'. Here you can set up the costs for the shipping for your two zones. ie for the 'Collection' zone, your shipping table will look something like:

Quantity...........Cost
1..................0.00

Set the Excess to 'Take the highest value in the table.

Then set up the shipping table for the UK 'Standard Shipping' class so that the correct costs get added to non-collection orders.

Enure that you have the 'If shipping band not defined' option to 'Do not allow shipping'.

This would meant that the first page of your checkout will ask the customer to select 'shipping destination', where they will get options of 'United Kingdom' or 'Collection' and the shipping will be worked out accordingly.

I hope this helps.

[timslatter]

Well thats solved my problem

Thanks very much Tracey

[swee]

Thanks!!! succeeeded

[NVL]

Not to be rude but...

We've been using Actinic Business for nearly two years and there's a pattern forming...

"Rather than listen to specific cusomer needs, update the software to have this functionality, just shove the generic pack and get third parties building plug-ins and wire the damn thing up like a Christmas Tree with work arounds."

There have been gripes about Link (export/import) software, shipping modules, drop shipping modules, surcharges (recently), currency conversions (which could use a live feed for current rate), payment module ... and others less specific for quite a while now. At some stage this normally involves Actinic clients spending hours tinkering with software which should work in the first place.., which differs from support which I feel is good for when a client can't get a function to work or understand a concept due requirement for training / support.

We all appreciate the difficulties of your business but as MD of a company with nearly fifty franchisees in the UK, if I were to treat my team like that with our product / concept there'd be some price to pay in the long term - not to mention a loss in client confidence. On behalf of all the users, can I request that the developers and upper managers sit down and set a solution schedule in place, let your clients know the rough schedule and goals ... then stick to it? All your client feedback is right here on these forums.

I hope you guys take this constructively as it's meant.

[cbarling]

Thanks for the comments David and they are taken as constructive. Please let me take this opportunity to explain what we're doing and why so many work-arounds are currently being used.

Actinic evolved from being a start up in a front room with very little money. As such, we had to be very responsive to customer needs or we were bust. Later we went public. Now we had to hit our quarterly targets or we would be given a good kicking by the city - and we were. All of this meant that we did a lot of things which met an immediate need but weren't so good in the long run. It led to a good core product, but it was hard to change or extend.

As an example, there's a current wish list item to add Special Delivery Instructions to emails sent from Desktop. This isn't easy to do, but it should be. In the past we would have responded to that in the following release and probably put something in the user-interface to control whether it happened or not. The problem with this approach is that you solve the particular problem but create other problems at the same time - other people may not want this option so the user interface has to get yet more complex.

The answer, of course, is to create an easy to use generic capability which allows the merchant to specify anything that they want in the email. The same applies, even more so, to the contents of the online store. The thing that's hard about this is that it takes a huge amount of effort.

Following our management buy-out a couple of years ago, we determined to try to take a more strategic approach to things. The first year was about improving quality of product and support, and reducing costs. I think that overall we did that OK. After that, our focus has been principally on product development.

The good news is that we are working in the background on a complete re-write of how pages are generated to fundamentally improve consistency and flexibility in this area. This will come out in v8 and we've already been working on it for sometime. Later, we hope to extend the same principles to reports, emails etc so that we end up with a product which requires very few frigs, and there will be a clear framework for extending the product where required.

The bad news is that it isn't available today, although expect to see parts delivered sometime next year. The difficulty with concentrating on strategic changes is that other features don't get the same attention. Our approach here is to encourage third parties to develop plug-ins and to try to find work-arounds. I realise that this can cause some problems, but most people get their requierments met by the core product or via this route. However, I should emphasis that this isn't the long term approach.

In support of all of this talk, I's worth saying that we have over 50% of the people in the company working on development, which is an extremely high proportion by any software company standards. We actually more than doubled the team in the last 15 months. I believe that it will mean that over the next few years the product will shoot forward in leaps and bounds.

In summary, all I can really say is that I don't disagree with your points, I share your frustration but we really are trying to do something about it.

I hope that provides a bit of useful background.

Chris
CEO, Actinic Software

[TiggyPig]

On the shipping side of things....

I have UK and overseas setup, but would like to have FREE SHIPPING FOR UK ORDERS ONLY OVER £50 for example.

Is there a way of doing free shipping for the UK only?

[TraceyG]

Hi Mark,

would like to have FREE SHIPPING FOR UK ORDERS ONLY OVER £50.

Is there a way of doing free shipping for the UK only?

Yes, as long as your shipping is done by 'Value', you can do this by adding a line to your UK class grid for:

Value.............Cost
£50................0.00

Then set the 'Excess' to 'Take the highest value in the table'.

[Dybbuk]

Hi,

Has the development team looked at this yet? It's an important issue holding back the launch of a client site, I'd hack away at the Perl myself but for delivery being a global, me not having the time and the future support issues.

I'm afraid not - this can only be done by using the weight method. I have posted your comments to our development team.

(in response to "What I really need to know is if I can apply free shipping to a product with shipping calculated by quantity").

Thanks,

DB

[cbarling]

This is being lookled at for possible inclusion in the next major release.

However, as Tracey mentioned in the last post, you can already get the shipping to operate so that it's, say, free over £50 in the UK but not outside the UK. It's just not particularly intuitive. See earlier post in the thread.

Chris
Actinic

[Dybbuk]

That method isn't a solution - the requirement is for free "delivery" on a Membership fee of £10-£15. The site in question intends to sell numerous tangible products above this price.

I tried setting up a digital download but it returned a heap of errors - would a digital download be suitable here, do you think? Where Membership details can be downloaded at a price, for instance.

Like I said though, I couldn't get this to work. Can you have digital downloads running in tandem with normal products?

DB

[cbarling]

OK, sorry I should have read your post more carefully. Having belatedly done so, I see what the issue is now.

Using Digital Download sounds like a good idea for a work-around (obviously only if you have Business or Developer). You can mix DD and other products, so in principle this should work. You could just attach a "Membership certificate" (.doc or .pdf or whatever) or equivalent as the DD payload. The buyer just gets a link to this in their receipt and email. It may even be possible to edit the email and receipt templates to remove the DD link if you want (I'm not sure).

Remember that DD files aren't included in snapshots. Other than this, if DD isn't working I would raise an email support query.

Chris
Actinic