Minimum shipping charge

I have gotten the calculated shipping rates to work for USPS First Class and UPS.



:stuck_out_tongue:



Question, I have a minimum shipping cost of $3.99 and First Class is sometimes less than that.



How do I set a minimum cost of $3.99? It doesn’t have to be by region since the other regions would be more than that anyway.



Maybe there is a handling charge somewhere I can add, but I don’t want add a handling charge if the shipping is over $3.99



Thanks!

-Laura

[QUOTE]How do I set a minimum cost of $3.99?[/QUOTE]



If you have “Realtime” shipping rates setup properly, then your rates should never be returned to your store at less than the minimum cost, right?

True - maybe I can’t do this with realtime quotes.



I am moving from a cart where I had shipping tables hooked up manually and it was a huge pain.



But, I was wondering if there was a way to set a floor for shipping via a handling charge or some other rule.



You could do it with a minimum order charge but people have more resistance to that than to paying less than $4 for shipping.

[QUOTE]I am moving from a cart where I had shipping tables hooked up manually and it was a huge pain. [/QUOTE]



Easily understood, been there, done that, and regardless of how you set up manual shipping, either you are overcharging your customers, or your business frequently looses money on shipping charges. And then, you get to re-think it all over again each time your carrier has a rate increase, fuel surcharge, etc.!



So, welcome to the real world of realtime shipping (& forget most of what you learned in the past)! :smiley:



If you feel as if you need to do so, then you can easily add a “surcharge” “on top of” any of your realtime rates being returned, for example a $1.00 surcharge, or whatever trips your trigger. This works quite well in the latest CS-Cart versions 2.1.3 - 2.1.4, (prior versions will most likely provide mixed results adding surcharges to realtime rates).

OH yeah! Forgot about the surcharge -

Am I understanding correctly that I need to add all the shipping methods like

USPS First Class (domestic)

USPS Priority

USPS First Class International



Separately?



Therefore I can add it for First Class only?



I have only gotten so far as to add First Class and UPS. They actually work. Amazing.



Thanks a million for your help. This forum is great!

Hello Lauraluc,



Yes, if you want to have several different shipping methods in your site, you should set them up separately. For more information about how to set up the USPS shipping method, please refer to this article in our Knowledge Base: [url]CS-Cart Documentation — CS-Cart 4.15.x documentation . Also you can try to set them up for the First Class only.



—

Anastasiya Kozlova

CS-Cart Support team

Hi Precious :wink:


[QUOTE]Therefore I can add it for First Class only?[/QUOTE]



Yes, you can add a surcharge to one shipping method, and not the others if you prefer. Or you could add a surcharge on top of each shipping method offered.



You will need to set up the individual shipping methods you choose to offer from each of the carriers you use. For example, with UPS you might create a standard ground method, then a 2nd day air method, next day air early am, etc. You have complete control over exactly which carrier offered services you choose to offer your customers!

Thanks everyone for your help. Now I feel really silly - I thought I knew where the surcharges were in the shipping setup, now I don’t. Must have been thinking of the payment modules. I searched documentation and can’t find them. I must be searching for the wrong thing.

This link should help:

[url]CS-Cart Documentation — CS-Cart 4.15.x documentation

Wow! Thanks a million! This forum is awesome.

On the “surcharge”, the way that we use it is we charge a 2% surcharge for orders under $10 and then when a customers order gets to $50 we actually do a -5% discount. Since we sell a small item sometimes the $6 orders kill us when we have to handle, pack and pay for padded envelope to ship them. The 2% helps pay for that while we are able to give a discount on higher orders because their is more product to spread the price out on. One BIG thing we did learn was you don’t want to do a high percentage discount (like -35%) or the shopping cart will actually give a negative shipping amount. I am guessing the percentage discount actually is discounting the products and not the shipping.

I think I have everything working now.



One other thing about realtime shipping, it would be really nice if a fallback rate could show only if the realtime quotes fail. In my experience, realtime rates sometimes don’t return results. So, when I went back to using tables I thought maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.



I know we lose orders when it for instance only returns the most expensive methods.



That being said, I love it so far!

Lauraluc,


[QUOTE]One other thing about realtime shipping, it would be really nice if a fallback rate could show only if the realtime quotes fail.[/QUOTE]



Do not spend more than one or two seconds pondering over this, really.



5-10 years ago this was more of a legitimate concern, however, in 2011 it is just about once in a blue moon that the major player realtime rates servers flutter! Our business is heavily dependent upon shipping (UPS, USPS, Fedex, as well as common carrier trucking) and we just don’t experience those types of issues any more. :wink:



A quick back-up solution could be, for example, if you used UPS on a regular basis, you could always have some Fedex provided shipping methods already setup on your site although set as “Inactive”, this way, if ever needed, you could easily swithch them to active within a minute or two.

Thanks - in the cart before this one (2 years ago) we used to have problems. Now we do have realtime rate quotes for UPS and sometimes it doesn’t return Ground. Our logs do show failure to return shipping quotes. However, new cart, new servers. New day. I won’t worry yet! Thanks!