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Wed, 05/27/2009 - 11:44
ignorant savage
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Our first Ubercart store is giving us fits. The store we're developing will ship several products via UPS, but we'll also use two different drop shippers for several additional products, and need to include the shipping options/costs provided to us by those companies.

UPS quotes works like magic for the products we'll ship. That's not an issue. However, we simply cannot figure out how to include the optional shipping methods/costs required by our drop ship providers.

For example, we will have numerous products drop shipped from a New York supplier, others will come from a supplier in California. We need to provide the customer with a select box for choosing from the correct group of options. Each drop shipper provided us with 4 options for shipping per product.

Originally, we tried to set this up using attributes hard wired to product classes. That gave us "by class" control over which shipping options appeared, but we soon realized that using attributes adds the cost of the user selected options to the product total before taxes.

We looked for a contrib module specific to drop shipping, but no luck.

Here's to hoping we missed something simple -

Has anyone solved this previously?

Any and all help greatly appreciated.

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Wed, 05/27/2009 - 14:02
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torgosPizza
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Re: Shipping Configuration Nightmare: We Can't figure out how to

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you need, but there is a module called "Ubercart Fee" which allows you to add per-product or per-product class fees to the order. (I'm not sure about the taxable situation, either, but it might be worth looking into and talking to the dev to see if the issue can be addressed.)

What I'd try to do is setup each product class as specific to the drop shipper. In other words if you have a drop ship location in NY and another in CA, you could make two classes: "NY product" and "CA product", both of which can have any attributes you choose, and then you can assign fees to those particular classes to include the drop-specific costs.

http://drupal.org/project/uc_fee

Check it out and let me know if it fits your situation. If not perhaps a custom one can be built for you (and possibly brought back to the community for other drop-shippers.)

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Wed, 05/27/2009 - 14:33
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ignorant savage
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appreciated | will investigate

Thanks for the clue.
I would love to see a module to handle drop shippers... are you saying that you would like to throttle it? Meanwhile I'll see if we can make use of this uc_fee.
Again, I thank you for the tip. I'll let you know if this can fit our project.

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Wed, 05/27/2009 - 20:40
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TR
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Re: appreciated | will investigate

Doesn't uc_fee have the same problem, that it adds fees before taxes?

Anyway, I see the problem as two-fold. Ubercart already lets you ship the products in an order from more than one location - just fill out the "Default product pickup address" on the product page to be your drop shipper's address. But Ubercart assumes that all the products in an order will be shipped by the same method (e.g. UPS). You customer will only get to choose one shipping method at checkout. So if you really want to have, for example, each of the 10 products in an order shipped separately from different addresses, *and* allow the customer to choose the shipping method for each of those products, then you're going to have to 1) write a custom shipping method or methods - one for each drop shipper - that calculates the shipping cost for each drop-shipped item based on the customer's selected shipping method for that item, and 2) modify uc_quote to aggregate the shipping quotes from multiple shipping methods, so that the customer only sees one price for shipping at checkout instead of separate prices for each item.

The custom shipping method will probably need to use product classes or taxonomy to identify products with drop-shippers, and will need to determine where to give the customer the option to select the drop-ship method (on the product page? in the cart? at checkout, in a pane?).

Depending on your requirements, most of which you haven't specified, I don't see it as that difficult.

<tr>.
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Thu, 05/28/2009 - 11:15
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ignorant savage
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Being More Specific About Our Nightmare

Thanks, TR, for weighing in. I do appreciate any help here.

I have not yet had time to check out uc_fee. If in fact it adds "fees" to product total before taxes it won't help us.

As for the specific requirements:

We will ship some products from our store. For those products only we are using UPS - which is enabled, calculating quotes already.

For products coming from our Drop Shippers, the UPS method needs to be disabled completely. Instead, users should be given a select drop down list of shipping options/costs (provided to us on a product by product basis by our drop shipper).

As I said, these options/costs vary from product to product, but a set of typical options is as shown below:

  • Standard Shipping: $21.95
  • 3 Day: $23.95
  • 2 Day: $25.95
  • Overnight: 29.95

What we tried to do was provide the necessary options using Attributes. Using product classes, we created the select drop down lists we needed, and with the options modifiable on a product by product basis this seemed excellent. We were able to provide the exact options needed on a product by product basis. But, Attributes was not intended to be a shipping module and we ran into difficulties quickly.

Costs associated with Attributes are added to product totals before taxes are calculated and (of course) do not show up on orders as shipping costs (causing the bookkeeper to raise a red flag). So, we continue searching for a solution to what we thought would be a fairly common situation.

Changing the point of origin (default pick up address) for these drop shipped products doesn't solve anything because the shipping options and costs are firm, provided by the drop shipper, and require no shipping quotes calculation. The costs are firm. Calculating shipping costs for these drop shipped products is not appropriate.

What we were able to do with Attributes is very close to what we need. The obvious problems for our case being that Attributes are not a shipping method and are not treated as such for orders, records, taxes etc.

This seems like something others would have encountered by now, but we've scoured the forums and not yet found a solution.

As always, any and all help greatly appreciated.

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Thu, 05/28/2009 - 12:47
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mrfelton
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Re: Shipping Configuration Nightmare: We Can't figure out how to

I believe my uc_fee module should cater for this situation. Fees applied with uc_fee appear as line items on the final order. When you set up a tax using ux_taxes, it is possible to specify, for each type of line item, weather or not you want it to be added to the total before or after tax. So, you specify that any 'Fee' line items (created via uc_fee) should be applied to the total after the tax.

I just tested this and it seems to work.

Tom Kirkpatrick - kirkdesigns.co.uk

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Thu, 05/28/2009 - 13:20
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TR
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Re: Re: Shipping Configuration Nightmare: We Can't figure out ho

Good to know. uc_fee sounds like it could be useful for lots of things!

<tr>.
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Thu, 05/28/2009 - 13:40
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ignorant savage
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Thanx So Much

@mrfelton, thanx for both the module and the response.

I'll let you know how things work out.

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Mon, 06/01/2009 - 05:22
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ignorant savage
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Like a Charm

@mrfelton - straightforward set up. Works great.

We greatly appreciate it.

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Mon, 06/01/2009 - 17:28
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torgosPizza
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Re: Like a Charm

Good to know it worked for you. Something to consider adding to Docs someplace, since a Drop Shipper setup is what many companies use..

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