Custom Shipping Charts

Ok, so if you check out my site www.rainbowracing.com you will see that it is a huge site with several items. I purchased the dynamic suite so that I could make our generic products available for online purchase. I am now stuck on the shipping. Here is what I have done so far: Set up 174 items in the products db that was provided by webassist. Pictures and everything are working properly on the search, detail etc pages. I added the security and now I am at the add to cart object. However, I chose to manually create my own shipping but I cannot find documentation on it anywhere on how to go about doing so? Our business is a mail order business but our rates are determined at the begining of the year and we use the rates based on zip codes. We use FedEx & UPS, if I create a table for this in the database can you please direct me on how I should go about doing this? Also, you will see that every product we offer is less expensive the more you buy (quantity discounts), there are 174 individual products with individual prices, weights, colors - so do i have to create 174 recordsets and 174 different buttons. I am a little confused here and need some guidance fast.

PLEASE HELP!

The first step in setting up shipping charges for your cart is to determine how you would like to charge for shipping and the amounts to use. Is your shipping based on weight, or number of items? In addition to the zip code what other factors are used to determine how much to charge for shipping?

Once you have this criteria clearly defined you can then go about creating your shipping charge rule. If you can post back with this information and an example scenario and how much it should cost for shipping I can help to give you some pointers on what you will need to do to get the rules in place.

thank you Eric for trying to help me! Ok first there are two things I am hung up on;
1) Shipping: 100 type C numbers that weigh 0.65 lb and a pkg of 5 gross pins that weigh 0.5 - the shipping total needs to round to the highest whole number for this example it would be 2lbs shipping to Deer Park, WA. You can see my shipping charts online here Shipping.htm so basically we make money on our shipping and there are prices listed for each weight, for each shipping chart (6) total - Our customers right now are asked to look up the zipcode, then the weight and then the speed in which you would like it to arrive, the chart reveals the charge for shipping based on this criteria ..... so scared you are going to tell me this is going to take forever. I have to create it some how though.

2) Quantity pricing: All race numbers are sold in lots of 100 - can I specify 100 instead of 1 for quantities to ensure the customer is purchasing certain items in 100's? Need number series from the customer (example 1-500, or 1-100, 201-300), how do I implement that? then quantities 100 to 499 numbers are .12 cents and 500-999 are .10 cents. - I have 174 items that all have different quantity pricing and I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the ecart object. Do I do it 174 times with 174 different recordsets.

I am a novice at php scripting but am well versed in dreamweaver. Please lead me down the lighted path. Thanks Eric for trying to help :)

The shipping that you have in these charts has many different values. You will need to create a single rule for each of the possible combinations represented in these shipping tables. This would require quite a bit of effort to incorporate into eCart, but it should definitely be possible. The best thing that I can think of for you would be make use of the FedEx and UPS shipping quote server behaviors to have them calculate the shipping based on the values returned from the api. If you would like to charge any additional amount for the shipping you can set a base rate and a per item increment rate within the server behaviors themselves. I would highly recommend doing it this way as it will be much easier to implement, and should not require you to update on a regulare basis since the values come form UPS and FedEx directly.

As for the quantity discount this too can be very time consuming to make all of these calculations or discounts for this. Calculations work with the columns in the cart and now with recordsets directly, discounts do not work with recordsets at all. If you visit the eCart support page and click on the link on the right side for 'archived documentation' you will find a section with this heading:

Quantity Discounts

You should check out the documents here to get a better idea of how to go about setting up the quantity based pricing.

Thank you for your response. Now i am trying to get Rainbow to go with the real time shipping but I am still not sure how you do multiple shipping providers? Do you just run through that wizard twice if I want UPS & FedEx. I feel like an idiot, but I am having a real hard time finding information on using this product when it comes to some major setup things here. Ecart is advertised to be very flexible with shipping charges and I am not seeing the flexibility here at all!

I will check out the quantity pricing this evening, thank you for the info on where to find the "info" at. Have a great night :) I will probably have more questions tomorrow.

The checkout wizard will not let you setup two shipping providers for the shipping quotes. What you will need to do is add in the other shipping quote server behavior to the confirm page after it has been created. You could then use a simple select list on the checkout page to have the user pick the provider and use this value to execute one server behavior over the other.

Thank you again for your help, I will be going back at it this weekend and hopefully I will finish with the tips and tools you have suggested.

Sounds good, let us know if you have any other questions.

Ok, so now I have extended my deadline to Dec. 1st and am writing to find someone to help me construct our custom shipping charts. Please go to Shipping.htm - I need to hire someone to create this for me. Any suggestions? Our shipping is figured out for the year and needs to match our catalog as shown in the above link. Each product has a specific weight, once the items have been added to the cart the weight will need to be rounded to the next whole number (1.5 would round to 2 lbs). Based on the weight, the zip code it is being shipped to and the speed in which the package shall arrive will have a specific price for shipping.

Does Webassist have freelance script writers? If not, do you have any suggestions? I have asked for assistance from your forum here on how to create this myself and it doesn't seem that anybody wants to handle that thread I guess? So who wants to do it and how much $$?