Restrict Shipping by Item or Category

We have a $5 Flat Rate shipping option on our store.

It's a "Custom Shipping Option" that we set up that allows customers choose to pay only $5 for domestic shipping. We've found it to be quite popular with our customers, and generally works as well as offering a Free Shipping over X Amount type of offer since many orders are small, and we don't lose much on the shipping....and if it's a larger order, it acts as an incentive (since customers pay only $5 no matter how large their order).

BUT....we have a handful of items that are oversized, particularly heavy or require additional packaging that we'd like to exclude from the offer.

I've looked but it doesn't appear that there is any method in the default install (we're on 4.1SP2) that allows items to be excluded from a particular shipping method, aside from choosing Domestic vs International, and a few options relating to shipping to AK and HI.

To sum up.... I'd like to be able to exclude specified items or categories from shipping via a Custom Shipping Option. Anyone done this before? Any thoughts on how to accomplish this? We already ask customers to not choose the custom option on some items, but most either don't read, or figure that since the option is available they should be able to choose it, even if we asked them not to.

 

If you are skilled at coding you would create a limitation (similiar to the AK and HI and other limitations) that you would call product limitations. Then you would need to create a table to add the product IDs that you want to limit (and probably a way to add and remove these in the admin). Then, add logic to the storefront to check if any of these IDs are in the cart and if they are then don't show the custom option.

 

That is how I would go about it. Let me know if you want to chat about it.

 

I also found and replied to this thread about the same topic: http://www.earlyimpact.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=4887&title=free-shipping-question