Customer Shipping Estimates in Interspire Shopping Cart 3.5
Published 05/27/2008 by Chris Boulton
With the introduction of Shipping Zones in Interspire Shopping Cart 3.5, it's no longer possible for the "View Cart" to calculate the shipping cost of orders automatically as it would have previously if you were using the flat-rate shipping methods (by order total, order weight, per item, etc). The reason behind this is because now that shipping methods are location based, we need to know the location of the customer (where they'll possibly be shipping their order to) before we can calculate anything to do with shipping.
Customers can now choose to calculate the shipping cost of the current contents of their shoping cart from the "View Cart" page. Clicking on "Calculate Shipping & Handling" will present a small form that allows the customer to select their country, state and post code and then click "Calculate Shipping" to view a list of possible shipping methods and costs for their order.
A speedy AJAX request off to the server and in moments the customer will receive a list of shipping methods that can be applied to their order. From the list, a customer can then choose a shipping method and click "Update Shipping Cost" to view the adjusted subtotal of their order with this shipping method applied.
The address that the customer selected is then remembered so that when the contents of their cart changes and they wish to recalculate shipping again, they don't need to enter their details - it's all been pre-filled.
That just about covers all of the new shipping related features in the upcoming release of Interspire Shopping Cart 3.5, though there have also been a few other small tweaks/additions:
Customers can now choose to calculate the shipping cost of the current contents of their shoping cart from the "View Cart" page. Clicking on "Calculate Shipping & Handling" will present a small form that allows the customer to select their country, state and post code and then click "Calculate Shipping" to view a list of possible shipping methods and costs for their order.
A speedy AJAX request off to the server and in moments the customer will receive a list of shipping methods that can be applied to their order. From the list, a customer can then choose a shipping method and click "Update Shipping Cost" to view the adjusted subtotal of their order with this shipping method applied.
The address that the customer selected is then remembered so that when the contents of their cart changes and they wish to recalculate shipping again, they don't need to enter their details - it's all been pre-filled.
That just about covers all of the new shipping related features in the upcoming release of Interspire Shopping Cart 3.5, though there have also been a few other small tweaks/additions:
- Digital orders can now have a handling fee applied to them. This is particularly useful if you need to cover bandwidth costs for large digital product files.
- Portions of the shipping modules have been rewritten and cleaned up to meet the latest module documentation standards (which will be available on the Interspire Developers Network shortly)
