Weight based shipping in 1 section only?

[parklifeclothes]

why the 'simple' method won't work with the new products you want to add? Won't this just make it harder for buyers to know how much shipping costs will be upfront?

Be careful with your shipping, if it's get too complicated you'll see customers abandoning their carts when they get to that area.

Postage really needs to as upfront possible. I assume you are trying to recover a little bit of postage costs on your heavier items but in doing so could lose sales and be worse off. In the current climate I think the delivery cost is going to play a bigger part in online shopping, as well as meeting/exceeding customers expectations.

Sorry, not much help, just hopefully a friendly bit of advice.

[Greenmind]

This is my situation:

We sell ducting. We sell both round and square. Up till now I have only sold round online.

The round comes in all sizes. Small and medium I send by courier - no problem. If it's large, I get my supplier to deliver it direct. They have branches all over the country and as large ducting generally means a decent size order they have no problem with it.

Square is different because we are the supplier; we make it. (I'm only putting it on the website because buyers have requested it)

Small and medium duct, again not a problem - it can go by courier.

Large, however, I have to deliver too. Our courier will take it. Their attitude seems to be 'if you pay for it, we'll deliver it.' But of course it gets expensive. Buyers will have to meet this cost, so free delivery over the usual £200 is out the window.

Square duct occupies one section on the website. It seems impossible to set up actinic to enable 'free over £200 except if duct in basket is square'.

Categories seems the obvious answer, but 'free over' is not editable at category level. You have to have it the same for all categories.

You can change it for zones/classes i.e. 'free delivery in UK over £200 but not Europe', or 'free delivery on 3 day service but not next day service', but that's no use to me.

The only way is to add the shipping cost to the product price and maintain the 'free over £200' on all orders.

This has 2 drawbacks: a) it makes the duct look expensive. b) anyone spending under £200 will effectively be paying twice for shipping (yes that doesn't sound like a 'drawback' but it is if they are put off by the total cost).

Alas, it seems the only way.

[leehack]

Square duct occupies one section on the website. It seems impossible to set up actinic to enable 'free over £200 except if duct in basket is square'.

Category based shipping would do just this.

Categories seems the obvious answer, but 'free over' is not editable at category level. You have to have it the same for all categories.

You are only interested in one category, why are you concerned about the others, they can be made to easily ignore the category class as i have already outlined to you.

[Greenmind]

Hmm. Kinda with you. Lets' say I set up 2 classes:

Standard (round) delivery and
Standard (square) delivery

I set up the round delivery class up to a 100kg limit

I make all the square duct weigh more than 100kg, therefore the round duct option (the one with the 'free over'), will not be available if square duct is in the basket. All good so far

The square duct delivery class will be up to 10,000kg.

The only problem here is that if you only put round in your basket, you will be offered 2 rather confusing options - both the round charge and the square charge. The round charge would be cheaper so everyone would, quite rightly, choose that.

But what would I call them? There wouldn't really be any difference between the services. Could I make the square charge not show if only round is in the basket?