UK Shipping Setup

Hello,

I’m facing a bit of a nightmare with a customer who want to ship with a company that has some complex rules:

1 - The UK is split across five regions (possible by state/counties but more likely derived from first four letters of the postcode)
2 - UK Postcodes are of the format XX99 9XX – not very helpful to analyse easily.
3 - Each region has seven choices for delivery – some include requesting that the delivery is a Saturday, others AM/PM etc)
4 – Cost needs to be worked out by weight
5 - There is a base cost for upto 15kg, then an additional charge per kilo.
6 – And of course shipping is free if order is over a certain amount.

Just in terms of data, this results in a cube where to derive the price I need to find the region from the postcode, get the weight, capture the required delivery option.

I don’t thnk the manual shipping plugin is going to be upto this as it stands. Do you agree?

My fellow UKers must have come across this kind of problem before – how has it been solved?

What are my options?

Tony

Thanks Nicolas.

I think I will go down the route of creating a new plugin against a set of new tables.

I've looked at the manual shipping plugin functions and think I can get my head around it. Think I will need to rewrite OnShippingDisplay and onShippingSave. That sound about right?

Haven't got a clue what is in the $order object yet but hoping it has all the customer stuff too?

My main question... because I'm thinking of a new set of tables (zone, delivery type, postcode, rates, exceptions etc), I need to make sure I update the hikashop tables with the right info once I have derived what I need.

Hoping looking at the ups plugin will help too. In essence I could think of this as building an internal web service - just needs to return stuff like ups I'm guessing.

Oh well - all fun.

Tony

Tony,

Can I ask if you got this working?

I have a client who's needs are less complex but is wanting to differentiate between mainland UK & non-"mainland".

Cheers
Steve

Hi SteveO,

No. It didn't go very far. Especially as we discovered the rules were even more complex involving supplements for size of box packaging. The formula the shipping company used for this was ridiculous in itself.

I suspect it will resurface but we reached a compromise between paying for my time to do, and making a more simple customer pricing solution. Some orders would lose out and others win based on the pricing structure. Overall it would hopefully be neutral. Don't think I explained that well but hopefully you get the idea.

Mainland and non mainland could be done just with post code ranges I think. For example all Jersey Channel Island codes start with JE. Isle of Man similar. Bit of work to investigate the codes but should be doable I think.

Tony