Restricting Items to Certain Shipping Destinations

[craigtubby]

Is it possible to restrict an Item to a certain shipping destination?

Basically, on our site we sell contact lenses and contact lens solutions.

For the UK we don't have a problem with this, but for international orders we don't want to sell solutions, only the lenses. (These solutions can be very heavy, with 6 months supply costing over £30 to ship to the US for example, which could actually be 3 times the value of the item)

Can we do this (we are still on 4, so are looking to upgrade), or are we going to have to look at creating different sites for different areas?

If we can't do that is it possible to have different areas calculate shipping for using different costings?

ie

For the UK, any order over £35 gets free shipping, else it's five pounds.

For the EU free shipping only applies to contact lenses over £35, and for contact lens solutions shipping is calculated on weight.

Everywhere else Contact Lenses cost £5 to ship, and any weight over 1/2 KG can't be shipped.

[cdicken]

I've been having a go at trying to model this, and have drawn a blank.

I can do the solutions issue by charging 'By Weight' and then having solutions weigh about 1000kg. This means I can set up weight bands for EU and Rest of World that charge not much for lenses and lots for solutions. For the rest of world, you can make the cost of shipping prohibitively high and put notices around the store about how solutions can only be shipped within the EU.

For the lenses, being a warer myself I know how light they are. I suggest just doing free shipping on all lenses no matter where they are going, and then just have a charge for solutions.

[craigtubby]

Hmmm, I was hoping maybe the newer version had a restrict by country option for each item.

We did try the "lots of money to ship to the US" trick.

We then got a panicky email from someone wanting a refund of £5000 on a credit card. I dunno, users.

[craigtubby]

I've been playing around with this, and think I've come up with a solution.

Basically we know that if an order is made for a set of contact lenses they will be over our "free shipping" costs, but solutions will all be under the shipping.

So, I've set up all contact lenses as a weight of 1, and all Solutions as a weight of 1000.

So, my shipping table looks like this for the UK

1,2,3,4 = free
1000 = £5.00
1001,1002,1003,1004 = free
2000 = £5.00
2001,2002,2003,2004 = free

And for everywhere else 1,2,3,4 = £5.00
No shipping for all other values.

This of course assumes no-one tries to order 50 different types of lenses (which we wouldn't ship anyway). Bit of a work around, and could become complex as we have some items that are neither Contact Lenses nor Solutions.

Still, being able to restrict which items could be shipped to which destinations could be a very good optional feature, even if a little complex to implement.

(PS, If you wear monthly lenses, they are quite lite, but 12 months supply of One Day Acuvue can weigh a fair bit, but we would post them free anyway as you've just spent over £300 with us)

[cdicken]

Good work. That is a neat solution (boom boom).