Shipping setup - standard charge per order but some products 'free shipping'

[worthydealer]

Hi -

I am getting slightly puzzled on how to set up my shipping charges the way I need them. Can anybody help please?

I want every order placed by a customer to have a shipping charge of £7.50. That is for the total order, irrespective of the number of individual products in the order.

However, within this very simple shipping scheme which I can see would be very easy to do, there are a few products which have free shipping if they are ordered just on their own.

So if a customer creates an order containing just products with free shipping, the shipping charge should be zero. If the order contains 'free shipping' products with any other products, the shipping charge needs to come out at the £7.50 for the order (even if it is all 'free shipping' products with just one non-free shipping product).

Can this be done in Actinic 8? If so, how would I need to set the shipping tables up?

Many thanks in advance (v8 newbie)

pete

[RuralWeb]

Use shipping by weight - lee has explained this many times on the forum

[worthydealer]

Yes but if I assign a weight to each product that has a shipping charge, won't my overall shipping charge per order just be the sum of the individual weights / shipping costs of all the products in the order? or is there some way to create a maximum shipping charge per order?

[leehack]

No you are wrong, EVERY product in your catalog has a weight put against it, whether that be 0kg or 1,000kg. It is how you set up your tiers and therefore how you charge for them that counts. This solution must have been discussed 150 times on the forum, have you tried a search or looked at the help files?

[worthydealer]

Many thanks for your input, everybody.

Problem now solved with a re-re-read of the Help files.

As I suspected, the solution has nothing to do with weights in this case. I just needed to set up 2 new shipping categories, one for free delivery with a £0.00 charge, and the other for courier delivery at £7.50.

Then I just needed to assign individual products to one of these 2 categories in the Product Details tab.

But what is really neat is that the maximum that gets charged for shipping for any order is £7.50, no matter how many of the 'courier' items the customer puts in their basket. And if the mixture of items the customer puts in their basket is a mixture of 'courier' and 'free' items, then £7.50 still gets charged for shipping. But if all the items in the basket are 'free', then nothing is charged for shipping.

Which is exactly what I wanted!!!

I have just upgraded to v8 all the way from v5, and this is a big imp rovement on v5 shipping, plus all the other improvements are really great. Well done Actinic! (still some way to go before you are perfect, though, before you get too big-headed!)

[leehack]

As I suspected, the solution has nothing to do with weights in this case.

Shipping by weight is still the method you should use and more importantly should have in place for future proofing. Majority of people make the mistake of not using weights to start with and then fall foul in the future when they want to do specific things. Lets hope your situation and requirements in the future do not need you to swap over. Well done for reading up and solving it though.