Two shipping quotes – Free for domestic and Flat rate for international

So what I was trying to do was to get 2 shipping prices for the t-shirts. Basically I want to make shipping within New Zealand free and I want to charge a flat rate of $12 to all orders to the UK.

Now I was not really aware of how the shipping quotes actually work when I first tried to do this and I got myself in a bit of a situation where I was adding a charge onto each garment ordered. So I went back to first principles and read about flat rate shipping quotes on the ubercart website.

Basically its really easy to set up the flat rate shipping options. Here are the steps –

 

Enable countries

admin/store/settings/countries/edit – here you can enable which countries you would like to offer shipping to. I have chosen 5 countries but I have only enabled 2 right now. These are the two which I will create shipping quotes for.

Set up the 2 shipping quotes

admin/store/settings/quotes/methods/flatrate/add – Add the flat rates for the 2 countries here. I have created NZ as $0 and UK as $12. Look carefully here as this is where I had my initial problem (of the shipping being multiplied by how many garments the customer bought)

The ‘base price’ is your shipping charge and ‘Default product shipping rate’ is where you can add a rate that will get added ON TOP of the base price, for each product in the checkout. Ah ha! I had been entering my shipping price into both and then having to fix that in the individual product settings where it is possible to over-ride this setting.

So you can see here the base price of $12 and the default product rate of $0.

 

And here you can see where I was doin an over-ride before in product settings. I now no longer have to do this and I am able to leave this blank (rather than $0.0000) The main benefit of this is that I do not have to go into each product separately and enter this – that was such a pain!)

 

Adding Conditional Actions

admin/store/ca – Here we are in the store administration and in conditional actions. The shipping quote setting is a conditional action. Basically what that means is that you are able to set conditions for each shipping rate so that it is only applied when those conditions are set. For example you could have free shipping on all large orders of ten or more, or you can have, like me, free shipping to one country but not to another.

So in here we have to set up the 2 conditional actions (shipping prices) for the two countries.

First I did New Zealand, which is free. In meta data I just gave it the title ‘Shipping Quote in New Zealand’. I think its best to keep names really descriptive so that if I am away from the site for a long time I will know exactly what everything is when I come back.

Its in the conditions where the magic happens.

So in conditions the settings look like this –

Basically all I have done is add a condition from the drop down list called ‘Check an order’s shipping country’ and then click on New Zealand in the list of countries that pops up at the bottom. Now what will happen is that this shipping quote will be applied when the shipping country is New Zealand – yay!

I had to also do the same for UK shipping (but obviously highlight United Kingdom rather than New Zealand!)

Now the shipping is “calculated” on which country is chosen at the checkout. Its only a flat rate tho so I am still not sure why they have to ask for province etc but I will fix that another day. For now it works and thats good enough for me!

Drupal & Ubercart Flat Rate Shipping – Problems and Solutions

22 Jan 2011 – just adding a couple of corrrections to this post

One of the biggest problems I have had with Ubercart has been to get a flat rate shipping cost that is added automatically to every order and that does not change whether 1 or 2 items are ordered.

(hmmmm, note to self – should I have it set so it increases after 2 items, so that the postage is higher for 3 or more items? – one for another day!)

What I wanted was a $6 postage charge to be added at the checkout. No shipping calculations and no problems if anyone forgets to click the button coz after all, if the postage is always a flat rate of $6 then there is no need to click the ‘calculate postage’ button.

My answer was very simple in the end but it took me ages to find it.

Here are the steps to go through –

Add your flat rate
Add a flat rate shipping method here admin/store/settings/quotes/methods/flatrate. I gave mine the title of New Zealand (this is what I see) and then the line item label of NZ flat rate (this is what people see at the checkout and means that later I should be able to add a rate for other countries too – but one thing at a time!)

I gave mine a base price and default shipping rate of $6. (By the way I went to the post shop first and checked how much it would be to send a t-shirt within New Zealand and there is a pre-paid envelope that would actually take 2 t-shirts and its the same price no matter what the weight is.  Thats why I want a flat rate.)

Correction – only give a value to the base price and NOT default shipping rate if you want the flat rate to be one price for every order, no matter how many items. The base price is the shipping rate and the default shipping rate is an extra which is added on for each additional item. This can be overriden in the product settings as shown below. But if you do it correctly here then there is no need!

Check all configurations in the store
The next thing to do is to make sure that all the correct permissions are enabled and that the shipping quote module is correctly configured.

I will explain what I did, and in italics is how to get there, ie for me I put http://www.hardluck.co.nz/admin/store/etc…..

admin/store/settings/cart – make sure shipping quote is enabled in ‘cart panes’ in edit

admin/store/settings/checkout – make sure calculate shipping costs is enabled in ‘checkout panes’ in edit

admin/store/settings/orders – make sure that shipping quote is ticked in ‘order panes’ in edit

admin/store/settings/cart/quotes/edit – tick the box for ‘prevent the customer from completing an order if the shipping quote is not selected’

admin/store/products – go into each product and scroll down to shipping settings, in here there is a box to enter the flat shipping rate to over-ride the default. We don’t want to do that BUT it says (in my one anyway) ‘Enter -1 to revert to the default value’

This is not right. When I entered ‘-1’ it just took $1 off every time I calculated shipping!  So in there I now enter ‘$0’ and it works fine.

This is no longer necessary

Get the shipping rate to calculate automatically
There is a wee piece of java script here that some amazing person has written, which when downloaded and saved into sites/all/modules (by uploading it with your FTP client – like Filezilla) will make sure the shipping costs button is pressed automatically. I found it by searching thru the Ubercart forums which is a really good place to look if you are having problems coz there are bound to be other people who have the same ones!

So here is a screenshot of part of my checkout and this was just after I added the address. I didn’t need to do anymore, its just added shipping on itself.

Test it thoroughly and have someone else test it too!
This is like THE MOST important step of all! I had my site offline for maintenance when I did this work to it and I tested it a few times myself offline. I then put it online and got my mum to test it too because if there is something that will go wrong she will find it!  I dunno how she does it but she can get even the simplest things wrong so I get her to check everything knowing that if she can work it then it must be ok.

I just thought tho that while it was online and she was testing then then theoretically someone else could have been on there too. I did have it checked by myself by that point and didn’t expect any visitors but I guess that could be a problem for some people. I wonder what other people do in this situation?  Do they work with their site offline?

The next thing I need to do is get my computer sorted so I can work with more than one offline site.