How to create custom shipments in a drop ship model

[ZLA]

Our website sells products from many vendors. All vendors offer standard shipping but some vendors also offer express shipping. I can create two warehouses with separate shipping methods so that the user can select standard or express for just those products that offer it.

Say the customer picks two products, one that only offers standard shipping and another that offers express and standard. Even if the customer selects standard for both products, they will see two shipments with separate shipping charges. But from their perspective, they're buying two items from the same company (our website) using a single shipping method.

Is there anyway to change this so the customer only sees a single shipping charge per shipping method? I've tried to think of several options:

• 1) Somehow calculate and only display a single shipping charge to the customer.
  2) Build a custom page that lets the user select shipping methods by item and then build custom shipments based on those choices.

Are either of these practical?

As a bonus, in the above example where the user selected one item from each warehouse but selected standard shipping for both, we'd actually prefer to create a single shipment for those two items. Is that possible?

Thank you in advance.

[AbleMods]

I have a very similar business model - everything I sell is drop-shipped.

The issue you are hitting is just how AC7 is designed. Since you are using different warehouses, AC7 must assume the shipments will be originating from different points-of-origin. So the multiple shipments start showing up and the customer is dinged for multiple shipping charges.

Masking this behavior would be pretty tricky. The checkout page uses some compiled routines to create the list of shipping charges broken out for each shipment. You'd have write some custom programming to override all of this functionality and re-combine everything into a single list of shipping choices.

Possible, but definitely not a walk in the park. The OnePageCheckout programming is pretty complex code. Even if you went the opposite route of customizing which shipping methods are available for which products, OnePageCheckout would still require modification.

From a business perspective, it might be worth a cost analysis on switching to a flat-rate or percent-of-order-total shipping cost model for all products. It would make things simpler for you and the customer. The only question is: could it be priced such that you're still in the black on shipping costs without scaring the customers away.