We have heavy equipment which has to be shipped by truck and varies depending on the destination and weight. The store owner has to contact a trucking company to get the price. This shipping charge then gets added to the order. The order flow is: customer adds product to cart - store owner gets price from carrier - shipping cost added to order.
We set up a product called 'Custom Freight Cost' with price $0 and Zero Price Action set to 'Ask customer to enter price. We made this a required product for all products which are heavy enough to require custom freight.
Since the piece of equipment can't ship using our standard UPS method we created a Custom Shipping Method called 'Custom Method'. It is a manual method and has no costs associated with it.
The problem is in the checkout process the Custom Freight Cost item shows up labeled as free shipping. It makes sense since the 'product' doesn't have a shipping price associated with it.
Has anyone had to set up a custom freight method for which the shipping charge is added later?