Simple freighting problem for the Australian Market, needing some advice

-- HikaShop version -- : 3.5.1
-- Joomla version -- : 3.8.11

Folks,
We are setting up a new business selling small packages of soaps and cosmetics, lip balms etc. Selling (at this stage) to Aussie customers only. Our freighting companies (Bless them) all want trading history of the amount of packages and sizes etc before they will entertain opening an account and allowing us to use their API's etc. Which of course we don't have, being new and all.

We have had two thoughts and were looking for an intel on what might be the best way to proceed.

1. Does anyone know off a company that could supply us with an API, where we don’t have trading history, that provides a brokerage type of service to the Australian Market?

2. Australia Post offers 3 Parcel Post bags that offer delivery anywhere in Australia with Tracking. 500 Gram 1 kg and 3 kg. These might provide all we need to the early stages of the growth in the business.

But for that to work we need “something” when the order is being created that works out the total weight of the goods in the order and automatically selects the right bag and cost. If an order went beyond the 3kgs then it sets a new order state that we can track daily for orders that are going beyond the 3 KG max.

Is there something “out there” that could do this for us already? If not, then we would be very open to suggestions on how to do this inside Hikashop.

Thanks to anyone and everyone who helps us, by way of reply. We really need this solved before we can open for business.

Hello Ladybird

With Auspost you could do this a couple of ways - there are a couple of existing plugins that you could use - one is a manual shipping plugin in that you set the weight brackets and price - and then during checkout it will "select\populate" the appropriate weight service for you (Assuming you have entered the weights for items)

The other links to AusPosts platform (via an API key you would need to get) and then uses the product dimensions and weights to calculate the shipping options.

There is also an alternative to Auspost called "sendle" which might be useful for you - - and this also has a free 3rd party plugin to Hikashop (Caveat I haven't used yet the plugin myself)

Hope this is helpful for you

Thank you.

The manual shipping method appears to work fine. Now we have to test what happens if the users order goes above the allowed weight. But at a start point the manual shipping method appears to work just fine for our launch requirements.

Sendle looks very interesting also. We will be giving that aspect a try in the near future, for sure.


Thanks again. Hopefully we can now resolve the last issue before we are ready to go live.
(Knowing that we will find more and more as we go)

But thanks for the reply. It helped a lot.