Ok, so I’ve been struggling with this for a couple of hours now and I can’t seem to get it.
One of my aquarium manufacturers has started crating all the aquariums shipped outside of California.
There is free shipping on the aquariums and I need to figure out how to add a crating fee to each aquarium over a certain size. Not only do I have to have a crating fee, but I have to have a different fee depending on what size the aquarium is.
I tried just adding a “shipping freight” charge, but since the tanks ship for free the charge is being ignored.
What I am doing right now is that I have a promotion set up for free shipping and just have the categories that contain the aquariums not included in the promotion. This kind of work, but unfortunately, not only does the freight charge get added in, but the cart also calculates the shipping fees through UPS. So for an example a tank shipped to me should only cost the $50.00 crate fee, but the cart calculates it to be $62.66. Basically it is calculating shipping a 1 pound package and then adding the $50.00.
I tried modifying the code myself, but so far I haven’t had any luck. So far I added a field in my product admin and database that allows me to add a crate fee and that works great. I just can’t figure out how to make that fee come up in the shipping costs on checkout.
What I need is a mod that will take my field that I created in my admin and then add it into the checkout. I need this to work whether there is free shipping or not.
This is what I need the checkout to look like:
This is what I have in my admin:
I can afford a few bucks to have this done, but I don’t have a ton of cash so please take that into account.
If anyone can do this please let me know.
Also, if there is a better / easier way to do this that I haven’t thought of yet please tell me.
Thank you,
Brandon
Hi brandonvd,
Maybe I’m not interpreting what you want correctly but couldn’t you just add the extra cost to the price of the aquarium rather than having it listed separately as a crating fee?
Lyn.
Lyn,
Yes I can. I actually thought about that because I really hate nickel and diming people with fees. Unfortunately, if I just add the cost to the product I will be considerably higher than what the manufacturer has the aquariums listed on their website. Even if my total price is lower than theirs, most people are going to see the upfront price and might not add everything up to get a total.
For now I’d just kind of like to get this to work. I’m toying with the idea of changing manufacturers so all this might be kind of pointless anyways. Oh well though.
Brandon
You could always put “Includes crating fee of $XX” in the description. I always calculate the total when a website offers free shipping as opposed to another website that sells something cheaper - I suppose you could try putting it in the description while you are working out some other way or trying to find another manufacturer.
You could use the manufacturer’s setting for this. You can set up a different shipping schedule for this and rename it to “crating fee for”. Then base the shipping schedule on weight (which would coincide with size). You’d have to do the math for the shipping schedule carefully so you don’t mess yourself up if customers order more than one tank. I would use both the weight and items ordered function for the calculation.
But honestly, maybe it would be easier if you took off free shipping and just added it as shipping. As a customer I think I would want to know up front without any surprises. I don’t think they would notice the difference between shipping and crating fees.
I already have the costs stated in my descriptions and on my shipping page so I am covered there.
I tried making a custom shipping method, but I couldn’t figure out how to add just the specific products to the method. I was hoping to created a method and have it charge a flat $50.00 fee and then just assign products to it. I couldn’t figure it out, maybe I missed something.
Even if I do manage to get a shipping method to work I then run into the problem of what would happen if a customer adds multiple items to their cart. If a customer adds an aquarium and a heater I would actually need to have 2 shipping methods. One for the flat rate of $50.00 and the other would be UPS. Unfortunately the cart only allows the customer to choose one shipping method, so I’m not sure how to get that to work.
Thanks for the ideas though. Maybe I’ll play around with it more today and figure it out.
Brandon