in our website www.theprinterdepo.com we are going to implement google checkout. However I am not sure in what shipping methods or strategy to use.
In this page:
https://developers.google.com/checkout/developer/Google_Checkout_XML_API_Carrier_Calculated_Shipping#Process
Google says that they calculate based on the total weight of the items, but the thing is if one person buys one printer thats fine, but if he orders 3 printers of 50lbs, the shipping cost is invalid calculating it with 150lbs. It has to be calculated as 3 packages of 50lbs.
How would you do it in this scenario??
I have only had minimal investigation to this, but I don't think this can be handled by default installation. I know that you would need a shipping extension that can support the Google API shipping-packages, but real issue is that not even the Google API can support more than one package, either by API limitation or restriction by choice.
The <shipping-packages> tag encapsulates information about
all of the packages that will be shipped to the buyer.
At this time, merchants may only specify one package per order
I would love to see this come to full use as it would be a great addition to be able to say that anything with a weight over x requires additional packaging but currently I don't think it is possible. While this can be accomplished by separating the order into three orders, but that will over complicate the user experience and possible cause loss of sales.
Source:
https://developers.google.com/checkout/developer/Google_Checkout_XML_API_Carrier_Calculated_Shipping#tag_shipping-packages
The "limitation" mentioned above is only if you will rely on Google to calculate shipping for you using what they call carrier-calculated-shipping.
You do have other options to calculate shipping:
you can pre-calculate using whatever formula (or shipping service/plugin) you have based on the cart contents (you would know this prior to handing off the cart to Google for Checkout), which is essentially sending a flat rate shipping cost to Google, or perhaps;
use the merchant-calculations-api option so you can account for the destination/delivery address (not just cart contents). This option is more complex (you need to handle callbacks from Google), but it does give you critical information to work with when calculating shipping.
hth....
Related
How do I create a module for partial payments ?.. means like client can pay Full or "50% now and 50% later". He should have the option at the time of checkout. Invoice will be created for the full amount but payment only 50%
How do i do that?
it should be possible and there is more than one way to do it.
I can suggest you the following solution for instance:
In case you are using a payment provider, you should modify its module in some way in order to take in account the 50% payment. For instance, an extra payment option should be created.
The remaining 50% should be persisted along with the order (custom order attribute)
However, keep in mind that in Magento, an order can only have 1 payment method.
Magento doesn't do this out of the box.Implementing this is a lot of work, because you have to pay attention to a lot of things.For this one I would advice to look at the already existing extensions. First of all because since it's such a tricky thing to build yourself better get something that has been proven to work and second because they're not that expensive. Probably the hours you'll spent on building itself won't weigh up to the cost of the extension.
Milople offer an extension for this where it is possible to pay Full or "50% now and 50% later".
I wanted to use drools for one of our projects - Online Buying and Selling.
Events are like Buying a book, Buying a pen, Buying a kindle.
These events are stored in a database.
Now, based on the events happened before, I want to decide the consequence.
Like say if a person had the following sequence,
1. Buy a book at a price.
2. Sell the same book at a higher price.
Then
Do something based on that.
If someone has done this,
1. Buy a kindle.
2. Purchase a book in Science Section of books.
Then
show him the relevant content in the UI.
I have all the listed things as Events in the database.
Now I have written an interface for the Actions to be done and I have also done the interface to pass a Customer when an event happens.
Now what would give me the best performance to process the events and make a decision based on the sequence of events. I cannot store all the events in memory for sure as I have a whole lot of those.
There are different aspects to consider:
For recommending additional items to customers, there are Recommendation Engines. You may want to use one of those, if most/all of Your use-cases are recommendations.
Storing "all the events in memory" is not neccessarily required. In fact, Drools removes events that are no longer relevant to the rule base. The documentation says
"Events may be automatically expired after some time in the working memory. Typically this happens when, based on the existing rules in the knowledge base, the event can no longer match and activate any rules. Although, it is possible to explicitly define when an event should expire."
To allow early removal of events, I would use Drools to generate aggregated data like "likes science topics", "owns a e-book reader", etc. Those can be inferred from the events but consume less memory.
After searching the web and seeing that the PAF file is not free I'm guessing there is no way to do this.. but.. does anyone know of a free system that can find a list of address with a postcode. It just seems odd to me that google can show all address wherever you click on a map. It knows the bounds of a postcode area, but there seems to be no way of listing all those address.
I need a free solution. I'm aware of postcode anywhere and that their sales people are very active within stackoverflow, but I cannot afford to pay their prices on this project.
This project only requires UK and india postcodes.
If I understand correctly, you are looking for a list/database of all mailable addresses within a certain postcode? Is that right? That will be difficult to find, at least for free. I know you don't need US data, but for reference, the US Postal Service is not allowed to give out this type of information, even for a fee, due to privacy concerns. I assume that other countries have similar policies.
I work for a US-based address verification service called SmartyStreets so I have some experience with this. There are third party services, you mentioned one, that have aggregated their own lists from various sources and can generate "saturation" mailing lists for specific postal codes. However, due to the cost involved in generating and maintaining these lists, I doubt that you will find this type of list for free.
How can I print a packing slip before the order status is "complete" (i.e. before I submit a shipment?)
The current workflow is a bit backwards, especially if you are using the packing slip as a pick list in the warehouse.
Extra: A solution that is upgrade friendly.
Thanks.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/5_-_modules_and_development/orders/automatic_picklist_printing_with_check_for_order_payment
Get a paid for module if time is money, otherwise muddle through the above link or write your own module. Observe order creation and send an email of the order may be one way to go if you want it customised with attributes not on the normal order email. Otherwise, cc new orders to an account, print them out and take them down the warehouse.
I have spent hours searching the internet for a solution to this problem and finally used
'Print Packingslips (pre shipped)'.
It prints your packingslips/pick lists with any order status. Works perfectly and is the cheapest module I can find.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/print-packing-slips-pre-shipped.html
Here's one that does the same thing, slightly cheaper:
http://www.reddotdevelopment.com/store/magento-order-picklist-extension.html
I haven't bothered to purchase any of these extensions to see how they've implemented the ability to print before shipping, but I've been able to do it myself pretty easily.
Seems there just isn't Admin UI around all of them, but it turns out there are a numerous models that support a getPdf method.
Creditmemo
Invoice
Shipment
Packaging
The difference between calling getPdf on Invoice instead of Shipment is there is no tracking info on the PDF.
You don't need third party add-ons for this. You can just click "Submit Shipment" before you have actually packed it and you will be OK.
You can then print the packing slip, pack it up and actually ship it.
Then you can add the tracking number and send the customer email afterwards by clicking the "Send Tracking Information" button.
That's how I do it.
Does anybody know if this is possible, or how I would go about it. My client wants first time buyers to be limited to shipping to the billing address only, thereafter being able to get items shipped anywhere. I think it's a reasonably common thing in eCommerce.
It's possible but it would take a bit of work to do. You'd need to modify the account pages that let users add addresses, and the checkout page templates (probably just the /template/checkout/onepage/billing.phtml page for the radio control that says 'Ship to this address'/'Ship to different address').
I'd do a check to see if a customer is logged in, see how many previous orders they have, and if they have a previous order then display the options to let them change their shipping address.