Suggestions - Shipping Calculated on Drop Shipper Adress

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Shipping Calculated on Drop Shipper Adress

Printed From: ProductCart E-Commerce Solutions
Category: ProductCart
Forum Name: Suggestions
Forum Description: ProductCart Suggestions
URL: https://forum.productcart.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=2029
Printed Date: 22-November-2024 at 4:09pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: Shipping Calculated on Drop Shipper Adress

Posted By: benpate
Subject: Shipping Calculated on Drop Shipper Adress
Date Posted: 06-October-2008 at 12:05am

Hi, it would be nice if shipping was calculated from drop shipper address when a product is being drop shipped.

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Replies:

Posted By: desireeknott
Date Posted: 19-March-2009 at 11:59am

I agree. That would be very helpful. We have a drop shipper in California and when someone on the east coast places an order, we take quite a hit on the shipping.

Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 19-March-2009 at 12:10pm

I also have multiple merchants dealing with this same issue.

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Posted By: benpate
Date Posted: 06-October-2009 at 9:58am

Does anyone know if this got included in v4?

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Posted By: ProductCart
Date Posted: 06-October-2009 at 1:20pm

Unfortunately, this capability is not part of v4, as calculating shipping charges by taking into account multiple "ship-from" addresses is very complex. In fact, it is almost impossible to figure out the correct logic to properly calculate shipping based on multiple shipments, from multiple locations (e.g. from the different drop-shipping companies).

For example... how many packages will each shipment include? An order might contain 15 products, 5 by each of 3 vendors = you don't know up front how many packages that will make. How do you take that into account when calculating the shipping charges? And if there are 5 shipments: do you really want to penalize the customer for ordering that many products and charge a shipping amount that is equal to the sum of all 5 shipments? Or should you provide a discount? Or should the charges be based on a weighted average of the 5 shipments?

Things can get really complex, as you can see.

Even if we were able to build such complex logic into ProductCart, perhaps the most important reason not to calculate shipping charges that way is that according to the research we have done, most large e-commerce Web sites do not charge the customer for separate shipments when the order is fulfilled by separate warehouses. For example, on Amazon.com or Buy.com, typically if your order contains multiple products, and the products belong to very different categories (e.g. electronics vs. music), you will be receiving multiple packages. Yet, the shipping charge that you pay remains clearly at a value that is associated with just 1 shipment, not multiple shipments. They might be calculating some sort of a weighted average of the different shipment costs (although we are not sure this is the case), but usually not the sum of them.

Basically, we believe it could significantly increase the drop-off rate due to shipping charges that appear too high to the customer.

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The ProductCart Team

Home of ProductCart http://www.productcart.com" rel="nofollow - shopping cart software

Posted By: benpate
Date Posted: 19-February-2010 at 5:59pm

You have brought up some really good points that I will have to ponder...

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Posted By: RedLeafDev
Date Posted: 29-April-2010 at 12:01pm

Indeed, good points to ponder. We struggled to find a logical solution to this for a while. We have just released an Add-on which allows you to calculate shipping from the drop shipper's location and I am confident that it will meet your needs.

You can find it by going to this page: http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/widgets/thirdparty/calculate_shipping_from_drop_shipper - http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/widgets/thirdparty/calculate_shipping_from_drop_shipper . There is an example here and quite a bit of information. It is available for all builds, version 3.51 and above.

See EI's blog piece about it here: http://blog.earlyimpact.com/2010/04/calculating-shipping-charges-when.html - http://blog.earlyimpact.com/2010/04/calculating-shipping-charges-when.html .

Amy

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