I've read the forum posts and realize that we're all going to have to weight (pun intended) for the new version to solve many things - or so we hope..

I would like to ask anyone that has actually set up their cart and shipping what would they recommend I do in my situation:

We will be selling wines on line in the UK for time being. The company that will be doing the delivery charges as follows:

1st case of 12 11.95 + 15%VAT
2nd or more cases thereafter 8.65 +15% VAT

then we have

1st case of 6 (actually 1/2 of a 12 charge)


1st case 5.98 + 15% VAT
2nd case etc 4.33 +15% VAT

Then there is the option of customers making up a mixed box of 12 bottles which each have an individual price.

I thought that I could put the four options into the fields and get the customer to add manually but it seems to calculate on own.

Any ideas anyone how I can implement my charges, or am I going to have to just have one charge per box (1st case price only) and a price per bottle so as they make up the 12 the total will be the same as box?

Would love some of your input on this and hopefully soon, This shop needs to go live within next few days.....

many thanks
Martine

Hi Martine. The pro version is scheduled to be released this month (December) and the weight based shipping will offer significant advantages to a myriad of small businesses. The Coffeecup team realised some time ago that there was a need for a higher level of cart with an enhanced feature set and the pro version is being developed to meet those needs.

At the moment you are limited to setting a shipping price per item in the info tab of item descriptions and/or setting in shipping values within the main shipping module. Just a question of juggling the figures around till you get something workable. It isn't ideal though and the user definable weight based shipping in the pro version will be a lot more accurate at working out shipping costs.

Only realistic suggestion I can offer, is to use the current version as a short 'stop gap' measure and upgrade to the pro version as soon as it comes out. Most major search engines usually take around six weeks to index new web site pages, so it wouldn't cause you any problems from a web marketing perspective.

Hi Will

I was hoping you'd give your input as I see you've addressed this and lots of issues in other posts - good that you are nearer in time zone as well!

I had a feeling this would be your answer. I woke up early hours thinking that I'd perhaps have to go down this road, means I'm possibly going to overcharge a little on delivery if anyone gets 2nd-3rd boxes, but I'll just have to send a refund or hold on account as it were.

Thanks for your help.

Luckily this is a fairly active forum and I've got pretty quick answers to queries on other CC products I;ve got/using.

Martine

p.s I'm a great multi tasker and a Brit too!

There are a lot of us Brits flying the flag for Coffeecup

The problem with the current shipping Martine, is that many folks haven't been able to utilise the current version of cart creator, including myself. No matter how you juggle the shipping costs around, those of us that have variances in product weights either have the option of overcharging the customers for shipping on some items, or losing out on shipping costs on other items, often by a substantial margin. Obviously that hasn't made the product commercially viable for many small businesses.

The pro version is going to turn a good program into a great program and is eagerly awaited by many of us.

If it's any consolation Martine, I have had to raise the prices of some of my items to compensate for the extra shipping charges for them until I'm able to set this up in the Pro Version. I also have decided that I will just refund their overcharges if there are any which I'm sure they won't mind at all As a customer who's recently had 2 refunds from shipping that a couple of the suppliers I use have done for me, I didn't mind a bit and it actually showed me they are not trying to make money off shipping costs which is always a nice thing to see too. So I would just adjust your prices of your items to accommodate the shipping for now. This way the shipping doesn't look so outrageous that they wonder what's costing so much to ship it. A few dollars more here and there on the products doesn't look as bad as a few dollars more for shipping does

Just my 25 cents

This is the way I'm thinking of going Jo Ann/Will

However, what if you have a no shipping charge for an item. i.e. Where our wines are stored in the UK, if anyone lives close by, or would prefer to spend more on wine (hopefully) than delivery charges they can go an pick them up directly.

I've already included in products basic options tab, the cost of delivery per item (on boxes) and for the VAT/taxes to be added to shipping cost and thought, ok so I thought I'll refund my customers if they order 2nd boxes as I get a lower rate for this, but it's too complicated to add to the system

Then as I was working on the text about picking up direct from warehouse I realized that I now needed a no charge category as well. I find the Shipping preferences a bit ambiguous. Do I select for customers to add their own shipping costs.? If I do so will this override the automatic shipping charge per item (case or ind. bottle)?

Am I right in thinking that we can't test the cart out until we are actually uploaded? If you haven't finished working on design, can you just keep uploading amended version each time and it will overwrite?

Do paypal have a test feature Jo Ann? I see you're using the same payment methods that I will.

Once again ta in advance...

This SCC shop: http://www.artistasoft.co.uk/shop/index.php has a fair bit in common with yours. I've set it up to allow the customer to select the shipping based on total order value without a default. You could probably adapt your shipping using this method but it's messy although it works. There'll always be the customer who doesn't select any carriage.

If Pro is coming before Christmas and it's Dec 7 now, the answer might be just to sit it out and wait.

Hi Martine. To test your site offline, you need a php server running on your computer system. Unless you are comfortable with offline servers, it is probably best for you to load your site onto your web space and test it out there as setting up an offline testing environment can be quite daunting.

Every time you modify your site or add content, it will make the changes when you publish your site via the program.

PayPal does have a testing facility called sandbox but that is aimed at web developers and you need to open a separate development account with PayPal to be able to use it.

Hiya Martine,

To go along with everything Will already said, what I did to test my cart to be sure it was working was to just go buy something from my site lol. I then found out it's very simple and easy to reimburse also which was something I was wondering how it would be done. So I was able to see that all will be very nicely taken care of even if I have to reimburse. And what's even nicer was to find out that Paypal doesn't charge for us to reimburse people, and they even refund to us either part or all of our service fee paid to them depending on how much we reimburse the customer. That was a nice feature to find also.

I would think if you put a disclaimer of sorts on your Checkout page (View Cart) to tell people to be sure to check the appropriate Shipping for their locations that they will. Explain like I did that not doing so could delay their orders in order to correct things etc. People don't like to wait so I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they will choose the right way.

With that said, I think you would benefit more at this time by creating special shipping situations and making them choose their particular case. This way you can create a shipping choice for Pickup at no cost, a choice for 12 pk. shipped out, 6 pk. shipped out, and so on giving you more versatility of shipping. Yes this may cause some problems for some people that may not realize they need to chose it but if you make it clear enough (bold it if you need to) most people are pretty good about it. They don't want to wait and if they choose the wrong one, it's not a life or death situation, you just email them that you need to either rebill them seperately for the shipping charges that weren't chosen, or that you're reimbursing them if they chose something higher than what it is. Most people are pretty forgiving on that issue, and if they give you a hard time on having to pay you the correct shipping then to bad for them, they should have read the info

Besides, this will not be needing to be in effect for long I will assume

The people that have existing ecommerce sites will tell you that the average customer needs all the help they can get.

I have enquiries for products I don't actually sell, people wanting to order colours or sizes that aren't listed, folks asking questions where their answers are already clearly answered in the item descriptions. I also categorically state on all my sites that I don't accept cheques, but I still get plonkers that send them. That's cool though, as I just put them straight in the shredder.

The new features in the pro version will make things easier for lots of us, but nothing is truly foolproof. All you can ever do with any site, is to minimize the opportunities for the customer to make a wrong input.