Simple Commerce: Shipping Costs
Development and Programming
Hey all,
I have implemented the Simple Commerce module over at my site (www.ludwignz.com) but would like to add shipping costs to the payment. I’ve searched the forums and all I’ve discovered is that EllisLabs might be working on a more advanced Commerce Module/Shopping Cart and that shipping costs aren’t supported in the vanilla version right now.
However, someone must add shipping costs? How do you do it? Or if you had to do it yourself how would you tackle it?
Thanks, Ludwig
Ludwig,
For our t-shirt site, thoughtcrimeink.com, I had to abandon a complex shipping formula for something really basic. There is a basic shipping charge, and if you’re not logged in or logged in as an “international” customer, the site has an ever-present button that reminds you to add an extra charge before shipping. This is processed as a PayPal “donation” since Paypal (frustratingly) doesn’t actually do complex shipping calculations. Simplifying worked for us however, as we’re in the apparel industry, and t-shirt shipping seems to be going in the flat-shipping direction. 90% of our customers don’t screw up, so the ever present button works.
However, if you have to do complex shipping, you might want to search these forums (or Google) for xClick Cart. I found out about it yesterday and am definitely going to be experimenting with it for our site, since we are looking to add coupons. It’s a server-side PayPal clone that acts like PayPal, but is an intermediary where you can set up shipping calculations, coupons, etc. – and when the buyer is done the contents of the cart and its transactions are sent to PayPal as a single “item.” Someone’s also written a tutorial on integrating it with ExpressionEngine (Google that too).
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Hey,
I think the best way forth is just to add a shipping cost to the price and mention that it’s included.
Thanks, Ludwig
There actually is a setting for shipping cost in PayPal, but the SCM does not provide for it. So what you need to do is, basically, create that PayPal form yourself, then set “shipping” to whatever you need, based on custom fields or user input.
I suppose the above applies to any cost added to the “price” of an item. So, there is no way to take on a separate “convenience charge”?
I don’t know what that means. The SCM only supports a sub-set of the options PayPal offers. If that set is too limited for your purposes, you can create the form yourself, as I’ve shown. You can then use “shipping”, “shipping2” or any of the other fields PayPal offers.