Calculate Shipping From Drop Shipper Location

Brief Summary

Merchants are losing money on shipping when the shipping rate for a product that is drop shipped gets calculated from the company's location instead of the drop shippers location. This modification calculates shipping from the drop shippers location to the customer's destination. There are many settings for this add-on, including the ability for the store manager to set the amount and direction of the “discount” that is used when calculating the total shipping amount.

What it does and why

Current ProductCart functionality

First, let's take a look at the current default PC functionality:

Scenario: 3 products (Product A, B, C - none are oversized) shipping from the Store Shipping Address (Origin - Massachusetts) to the customer (Destination - Maine).
Result: Unless there was a maximum weight set (or one of the products was really heavy) they would all ship together in one box. The shipping rate would be calculated based on the weight, the shipping origin and destination. It would probably be around $6 to ship through a “ground” shipping option.
The Issue: Now let's say that Product A is actually drop-shipped from a warehouse in Florida and Product B is actually drop shipped from a warehouse in Nevada. This is the scenario that is causing merchants to lose money on shipping as the actual shipping costs are clearly higher than if all products were shipped from the same location.

What changes with this Add-on

Now, let's take a look at the modified result obtained by using the Calculate Shipping From Drop-Shipper Location add-on:

The products are split into multiple packages based on where they are shipping from (origin) and a weight is determined for each package.
The shipping rate is calculated based on the weight, the shipping origin (this time from the drop shippers shipping address) and destination.
The amount actually charged to the customer depends on the values that have been set in the Control Panel for “tolerance” and “direction” (see screen shot below).
- The “tolerance” is the amount that the store manager chooses to discount the shipping. The shipping can be discounted up to 50% - or not discounted at all (if tolerance is set at 100). If the tolerance is set to 100 - no discount will be given (each pacakge will ship at its full rate and all packages will be totaled with the full value presented to the customer). If the tolerance is set at 50 some packages will ship at a discounted rate (up to 50% off) depending on the distance that they are shipping.
- The “direction” option allows the store manager to chose whether to charge more for packages with a shorter distance to travel or more for packages with a longer distance to travel.

An example

Let's say for our example that the tolerance is set at 75 and the direction is set to charge more for packages with a shorter distance to travel.

Next, the mileage from origin to destination is determined. That mileage fits into a range of miles and based on that range a discount is set, up to 75% of the actual rate (which is the tolerance value). Here is how that discount affects the actual shipping rates that were returned.

Product A (shipping from Florida - approx. 1350 miles) would be discounted to be 87% of the actual rate returned.
Product B (shipping from Nevada - approx. 2500 miles) would be discounted to be 80% of the actual rate returned.
Product C (shipping from the default address in Massachusetts - approx. 100 miles) would be discounted to be 98% of the actual rate returned.

The discounted amounts are totaled, and that is the shipping amount that is presented to the customer.

Screen Shots

Storefront

There are no changes in the way shipping rates are presented in the storefront, other than the fact that ProductCart will inform the customer that multiple packages are being shipped.

Control Panel

Additional Shipping Settings have been added to the Control Panel to set the Tolerance and Direction variables.

Examples

Stores using this add-on:

We will be updating this list soon!

See http://modsv35.redleafdevelopment.com for a live version 3.51 example.

System Requirements & Installation

Available for ProductCart V3.51 and above (including V4.1), including the standard, BTO and Apparel builds. Earlier versions have not yet been tested. All of our add-ons contain folders for Parent Paths Enabled and Parent Paths Disabled code. This installation is a minor modification to the original source code and includes a database upgrade. NOTE: Because of the nature of this mod it is NOT available for stores using an Access database!