Selected Shipping methods for Specific Items

[fatone]

What is the best approach to setting up certain products to only be shipped a certain way? Reason being, some items are expensive and I don't want them shipped via USPS. I want them shipped via FedEx for the insurance and other reliability factors.

I was thinking I would set up a warehouse (say warehouse2), which would have the same address as my existing warehouse, but then change the product to be shipped from (warehouse2) and then change the Shipping method to only ship from a Selected Warehouse (warehouse 2).

That brings me to another question, what if the basket contains a product from warehouse1 and warehouse2? What shipping methods would be used? I hope since one product can only ship from warehouse2, it would only show those shipping methods!

[fatone]

Sorry for taking up the bandwidth, but I tried it and it worked as expected! Since the shopping basket had 2 items from different warehouses (really the same location), it only get the set of shipping methods that could be done between both products!

Can't wait for the customers to start using the new site! It is still in production, but I think they will be quite happy with all the new features!

[AbleMods]

Ha you beat me to the answer, well done!

Multiple warehouses is the way to control it. Since shipping methods can be assigned to a particular warehouse, you can get quite creative with your setup. AC7 automatically knows when different line items require different shipments and sets it all up for you quite nicely. The total freight charges will probably freak a customer out, but that's the way it is with multiple warehouses

The only downside I've seen is that one product cannot be shippable from more than a single warehouse. Fortunately that situation does not affect me but I'm sure it will affect others. My IT business has a great distributor with 5 warehouses. Any given item could ship from any given warehouse - this configuration would not be compatible with AC7 without setting the same product up 5 times. I'm willing to bet we'll see that feature added at some point down the road.

You can also control available payment methods using a similar concept. Since payment methods can be assigned to specific user groups, certain "big" customers can automatically see the "Check" payment method while everyone else pays with credit card and never knows a check option even exists.

You should be aware of some particulars with shipping methods that I have encountered:

Google Checkout
GC doesn't like to wait. They give your website exactly 3 seconds to return calculated shipping rates during a Google Checkout process. If your site fails to meet their unrealistic expectations, the default rate configured in your GC Gateway setup will be applied to ALL shipping methods. If you don't use Google Checkout, this is not a point of concern.

Shipping Estimator
The Shipping Estimator doesn't like shipping methods set to specific zones. If you're using the estimator/minibasket on your site, you will need to set each shipping method to "All Zones" for Shipping Estimator to calculate a rate. if you don't, it will return "No available shipping methods were found..." regardless of the product or zip code. This is a known issue however it's survived three releases of AC7, so I don't know when it's going to get fixed.

[fatone]

One issue is coming up! If I add a product that can only be shipped via one shipping method and then another product that can be shipped from many shipping methods, sometimes the shipment is broken up! Technically speaking, since I have two warehouses they should be shipping from different places. But, the only reason I used the multiple warehouses was to be able to limit the shipping methods for certain items.

I would prefer to only ship with the common shipping method between both products, not split up the order. Is there a way to do that?