Shipping method for multiple warehouses

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8 months 6 days ago #348609

-- HikaShop version -- : 4.7
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Hi,
currently a shipping method can only work for one warehouse.

In a previous version, leaving the warehouse value blank allowed for overlapping of multiple warehouses (although this was very buggy).

Is there any way to offer a shipping method for products of multiple warehouses?

We want to give our customers free shipping when they order more than 30€. Instead, they have to pay twice the shipping cost because of different warehouses.

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8 months 6 days ago #348610

Hi,

If you don't set a warhouse in a shipping method, it should be available for all the warehouses.

Also, if you want to provide free shipping over a certain amount, why not create a coupon for that ? You can activate its "auto load in cart if possible" setting and use its "shipping percentage" setting to provide a 100% discount on shipping.

Also, note that most of the time, merchants will use warehouses while they actually shouldn't for what they are trying to achieve. In most cases, it's possible to do better shipping cost calculations without warehouses. But to tell you if there is a solution to what you want, I would first need you to explain what shipping costs you need to charge (maybe with some examples ?)

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8 months 4 days ago #348723

Hi nicolas,
thank you for your reply!

Seems like I was wrong - though I could have sworn my shipping method wasn't showing up when I removed the warehouse restriction.

However, I'm seeing some very weird behavior now:

1) I have a shipping method that has no warehouses set and that becomes available at a weight of >20000g.
2) I add a book (500g, warehouse 1) and another product (800g, warehouse 2) to the cart.
3) I change the book's amount to 100 in the cart. (To reach the 20000g)
4) The shipping method becomes available.
5) I select it for both products.
6) I reduce the book's amount to 1 in the cart.
7) The shipping method is still available for the other product. It only becomes unavailable when I switch the address to a zone for which it isn't applicable. When I switch back, it's still there.

On another note: Coupons might indeed be helpful. There is no way to restrict them based on weight though so I'll have to talk to the boss if value/quantity is fine.

Our dilemma is this:
We sell books and some non-book products. Books are easier to fit into certain packages and are therefore cheaper to ship. That's why we need to charge more for orders that don't exclusively contain books. However, because we package all ordered items together we don't want to charge customers twice if they mix a book with a non-book product.

In a perfect world I would be able to set one shipping method for the whole order instead of per warehouse, while still taking warehouses into account - is this possible?

Last edit: 6 months 2 weeks ago by NTV.

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8 months 4 days ago #348725

Hi,

From what you're saying, I don't think you want to use warehouses.

What I would do is something like this:
- dimensions of 0 for books
- dimensions of 1 for other products
- shipping methods with a max volume of 0.1 for shipping methods for books only
- shipping methods with a min volume of 0.1 for shipping methods with at least one other product
It's much simpler, and I think it better matches what you want to achieve.

Last edit: 8 months 4 days ago by nicolas.

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6 months 2 weeks ago #350137

Hi,

using dimensions for this isn't an option since we display the actual dimensions to the user.

Concerning the problem I've described above: Weirdly, it only occurs when you set a minimum weight and not if you set a minimum price. So if I were to add a free shipping option for orders above 20kg, people might trick the system to get free shipping for orders much smaller than that.

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6 months 2 weeks ago #350145

Hi,

Then you could do the same with the weight instead of the dimensions provided you don't display the weight.
Or you could not display the dimensions, and instead create three custom fields of the table "product" where you could add the dimensions to be displayed instead of using the normal dimension fields of HikaShop for that.

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5 months 1 week ago #351040

Still wrestling with selling two different categories of products. I've given up on having different shipping methods for different kinds of products.

However, now this weird behavior occurs:
1. Put a product of category A in the cart
2. Put a product of category B in the cart
3. Go to checkout
4. Hika will say that the order weight exceeds the available shipping methods for the second product in the cart (regardless of actual weight)

Example screenshot:

Warning: Spoiler! [ Click to expand ]

The available shipping methods for the Zone in question:
Warning: Spoiler! [ Click to expand ]

Attachments:
Last edit: 5 months 1 week ago by NTV.

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5 months 1 week ago #351050

Hi,

When HikaShop get the list of available shipping methods for a warehouse, it goes through the shipping methods one by one and each time a shipping method is not available, it stores the error message to display it to the customer.
So after going through all the shipping methods and finding no suitable ones, it probably has several different error messages but in order to not confuse the user, it only displays the first one.
So what you need to do is to temporarily disable the other shipping methods and only leave enabled the shipping method you think should appear for that warehouse and you'll get the adequate error message.

Note however that checking your screenshots, I think the issue is linked to warehouses.
In your screenshot of the checkout, what is displayed clearly indicates that the products are in two different warehouses.
But in your screenshot of the shipping methods listing, none of them are assigned to any warehouse.
I suppose that you might have just deleted the warehouses, thinking it would be ok.
You need to also run a mass action on the product data with an action "update the values" on the column "product_warehouse_id" to set that value to 0 for the products which you don't want to use a warehouse. Otherwise, the id of the warehouse is still in the database, even if the warehouse is deleted and the system will still group the products based on that.

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5 months 1 week ago #351068

Hi,

my impression was that setting no warehouse restriction on my shipping methods would imply that it can be used for products of any warehouse. This seems to be the case for the first item in the cart (It has a warehouse set, but correctly selects the shipping method which has no restriction set). It's only the second position in the cart that doesn't want to select the method (Remember that if I switch the order around, it's the other product that doesn't find a suitable method.

It feels like Hika disables all other shipping methods with the same warehouse value once one of them is selected for a product.

The problem does indeed resolve if I remove the warehouse value for the products in question. However, this is not an option, since we need to distinguish between those product categories for our national sales where our shipping expenses for category A are almost triple that of category B.

Is there no way to have shipping methods that apply to all warehouses? If leaving the warehouse restriction field blank is not supposed to accomplish this, maybe the field could be allowed to include more than one Warehouse?

Last edit: 5 months 1 week ago by NTV.

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5 months 1 week ago #351069

Hi,

Shipping methods without a warehouse restriction will be available for all the warehouses.

Please understand that I don't have a full picture of your setup. So I was making assumptions in my previous message to try to understand the situation and provide insights in the problem you're facing.

As I said

When HikaShop get the list of available shipping methods for a warehouse, it goes through the shipping methods one by one and each time a shipping method is not available, it stores the error message to display it to the customer.
So after going through all the shipping methods and finding no suitable ones, it probably has several different error messages but in order to not confuse the user, it only displays the first one.
So what you need to do is to temporarily disable the other shipping methods and only leave enabled the shipping method you think should appear for that warehouse and you'll get the adequate error message.

Doing that should provide interesting information on what the problem is with the shipping method which should display there but doesn't.

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5 months 1 week ago #351131

Hi,

I solved my problem using the advice you gave about dimensions. These are the steps I took:

1. Use a mass action to remove warehouse values from products of category A (Books) and B (Plushies and other large products). Filter by product_warehouse_id and set it to 0.
Now shipping methods that don't have a warehouse restriction can be selected for these products. Products will also be grouped together if applicable, so the customer won't have to pay twice any more.
2. Set a maximum volume for the shipping methods which are supposed to be exclusive to products of category A. For us it was 4375 cm which is the maximum allowed for DHL Warenpost.
3. Use a mass action to set the volume of category B products to 100cm x 100cm x 100cm or something equally ridiculous so they will never be applicable for shipping with the methods mentioned previously.
4. Set your other shipping methods to have a minimum volume of 4376 cm so they don't also show up for products of category A.
5. Use a custom field to display the actual dimensions to the user.

Not 100% clean, but it works well and seems to cover all cases.

Last edit: 4 months 3 weeks ago by NTV.
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