Hi All,
I wonder is there a way to calculate shipping as a mileage charge?
If not by the mile possibly in multiples of 10 miles.
0 to 10 miles x amount
10 to 20 miles x amount and so on.
This is for a business delivering garden products 80 miles radius of base.

Scott:
Any idea how far away from the Styler program?

Cheers,
Baz.

Hi,
As I am working with the program a couple of things I think might improve the look of the finished project:
Thumbnail images in the categories are too small.
Some way to decrease the number of rows and increase image size x 2.
As I mentioned before, the light box effect to wrap around image.

Baz.

Expect an announcement very soon on the designer program.

When shipping costs can run into thousands of (£UK) pounds in extreme cases, allowing the shopping cart software to generate the charge could turn out to be a costly gamble.

I have to admit, I haven't really looked into Shopping Cart Creator in that much detail, but when it was first launched, I made a decision not to adopt it because it just wasn't flexible enough. Can anyone describe how they configured it to allow them to create complex shipping charges based on a combination factors like distance, weight, volume and mode of transport.

Just how flexible is Shopping Cart Creator for shipping charge calculation ?

Hi Scaffolding Man,
I started with the idea of zones Red (X amount) - Blue (X amount) and so on.
Then I remembered how devious some customers can be.

I used to be into house removals, standard charge for 1, 2, 3 bedroomed houses and so on. One guy booked a removal for a 2 bedroom rate, when we got there it was a 3 bedroomed house, he had moved the furniture from the 3rd. bedroom into the second bedroom and called it a 2 bedroom move!!.

For the job I am doing I figured post code banding was best, easy for 80 mile radius, UK mainland could be tricky.

Cheers,
Baz.

Hmmmm....Thanks for that Baz.

You're right, everyone likes a bargain. I think when people are ordering online, it probably makes them more likely to try and reduce the cost in an underhand way because they aren't interacting with a person initially.

When I sell scaffolding, I have to contend with different methods of delivery as well as distance, so up until now, it has always seemed preferable to work out a price after talking to the customer on the phone.

I know of one scaffolding company that consistently undercharged for carriage and it contributed to them going out of business. In their case they were not allowing software to make decisions for them, so they only had themselves to blame.

It's probably time I took another look at the Shopping Cart software and see if it could work for me. By the sounds of it, you forced it to do your bidding, which sounds promising.

Unfortunately SCC is very limited in the range of shipping calculations it can handle. Scott has already indicated the initial release of the pro version will not have any improvements in the shipping calculations it can handle.

There is currently no facility for utilising item weight in shipping, which severely limits the program for use in a wide range of applications. Hopefully the Coffeecup team will resolve this issue in the near future, so the program is better suited to a broader spectrum of customers

I think one of the biggest problems was identified this week. The FACT that CC Software is so well known and used, WORLDWIDE, makes it very difficult to tackle some of the bigger issues out there. Taxing was one of them and CC has come through that challenge. Shipping is yet another, and I am POSITIVE that the fine folks at CC will pull through again. I actually think one of the best solutions MAY be to create add-ons, much like they did with the Pay-Pal and Google checkouts. This would allow them to focus on one particular shipping method at a time. But regardless the road that CC takes, I know it will be one that works.

The internet offers a global market place, to sell your goods worldwide. The fact that SCC currently has a very basic and limited shipping module means there are thousands of potential new customers for Coffeecup, for whom the cart program in totally unusable in its current guise. Coffeecup itself, sadly loses masses of potential revenue from that scenario.

As regards shipping, It doesn't matter WHERE you are in the world, or WHAT your shipping service may be called, you still have wide variances in costs. This is particularly so of international deliveries, which have narrow pricing bands. Unless all of your products are virtually identical in weight, it is currently impossible to work out the shipping correctly in SCC. Losing out money on shipping, or ripping off your customers with high shipping costs, isn't going to profit ANYONE. It certainly isn't a good business practise if you intend staying in business for any length of time. It is the CORE program that needs the shipping options reviewed, particularly if you are going to attach a 'pro' tag to the forthcoming product.

I too think that the guys at Coffeecup do a great job and bring out some very innovative products, but the products have to reflect the 'real world' environments into which they are placed.