Free Shipping Setup

[RVPSRichard]

I’d appreciate any help on an issue I’m having related to setting up my free shipping offer

The parameters for what we want to offer are:

1. We ship all orders over $50 free to most of Canada and the USA
2. We charge shipping for all orders under $50 or orders going to Northern Canada, Alaska, Hawaii and all destinations outside the US/Canada.
3. On orders qualifying for free shipping, we want to offer alternative paid shipping methods for faster delivery.
4. We offer customers an option to select in-store pickup with no added shipping charges on web orders placed online.
5. All items qualify for free shipping via a carrier of our choice, conditional only on delivery location

The current settings we have implemented:

1. Free Shipping set at $50 minimum in Shipping/Preferences
2. A cart rule is set up to apply free shipping to all orders over $50 to specific locations and via only certain carriers.
3. We have a “Free Shipping” shipment method set up applied only to applicable zones
4. There is an “In-Store Pickup” no-charge shipping option without any geographical restriction
5. Carriers are set up conditional on zones each carrier (service) applies to.
6. Each product is tagged with all shipping methods applicable.  We have three groups of product volumetrices (small parcel, oversized parcel and truck freight) and each group has the same set of applied carriers.

And the current behaviour we are getting is:

Canada/US (Free Shipping Destinations)

1. Orders under $50 – Incorrectly offers free shipping in addition to correct paid shipping methods
2. Orders over $50 – incorrectly offers all available shipping methods free.

International

1. Orders under $50 – works correctly, only paid shipping methods applicable show.
2. Orders over $50 – incorrectly offers all available shipping methods free.

Can someone give me an idea of what settings I am going wrong on?

 

Any help is appreciated

[RVPSRichard]

Solved.

 

1. Set up a "Free Shipping" shipping service that activates at $50.

2. Set up all paid shipping methods for various zones to display as well where applicable.

[Naldinho]

How do you define northern Canada? If you mean to the territories then using zones is all you need. If you consider the top of the provinces northern Canada then things get a little more complicated.

[RVPSRichard]

We needed to specify Northern Canada (the territories) and Alaska/Hawaii as zones separate from Canada and the US only because our free shipping offer doesn't extend to those zones.  Therefore, our free shipping "carrier" option only applies to shipments in the 10 provinces and lower 48 states.

 

We then had to set up every paid carrier that was calculating separately for each zone.  For example, we have a Canada Post Expedited Parcel option for both "Canada" and "Northern Canada".

[Naldinho]

I've avoided using zones in my shipping setup (use postal codes instead with a add-on module) but if you are doing it by province / territory then zones should work.

The free shipping showing up when it shouldn't -- are you talking about Free Shipping in the cart prior to checkout or actually at checkout? PrestaShop has an annoying issue of showing Free Shipping to customers who have added stuff to their cart but who have not yet registered an address. The only way to fix this is by changing a couple of lines of code in some core files.

I have a pretty elaborate shipping setup but because I did it a different way I don't have much experience with the built in shipping options. That said I believe that 

1. Free Shipping set at $50 minimum in Shipping/Preferences

Is the first thing you should change. My understanding is what is making all the orders over $50 free.

If I was setting this up I would create a new carrier called Free Shipping and make it conditional on > $50 and != territories. Create another carrier called In Store Pickup that also has a cost of $0 and make it only show up for your store's zone. The rest I would just allow the modules that fetch costs from the various carriers to handle and there you don't define any zones.

I think that is what will get you where you want to go but like I said I completely avoided zones simply because I wanted more granular control. Shipping to Thompson Manitoba is not the same as shipping to Winnipeg which is why I asked about how you define Northern Canada. It is a lot cheaper to get something to Yellowknife than it is to get the same item to some parts of the provinces.

[RVPSRichard]

The main reasons we put in a separate carrier to display for a free shipping option:

 

1. We were able to better control what addresses qualified for free shipping

2. We found, at least in our initial testing, that using the free shipping switch within a particular carrier gave free shipping to people who did not qualify.

3. Because we now display "Free Shipping" in addition to every available paid service to a customer's address, we have the possibility that they will take a paid service (even the one we were going to ship free with anyway) if they perceive that the free shipping time frame is too short for them.

 

You can see how this works if you just go to our site at www.rvpartshop.com and add something to the cart and start the checkout process.  You can preview the available shipping options without going through the checkout process on the cart page.  Just enter different countries, provinces/states and postal codes to see the shipping service display behaviour.

 

 

 

 

If you want a demo

[RVPSRichard]

Regarding your shipping calcluations, I understand there's a big variation on shipping charges within Canada. We also have the added issue of having everything from very small items to large, long products like awnings, to skids going truck freight.  What we did is a calculation based on our discounted shipping rates to ship that product from our base in Ontario to Calgary.  We felt that that was a reasonable to high average to use.  So we do better with Ontario and Quebec shipments on margin, but have to accept thinner margins for BC and Newfoundland shipments.    We work this system a little by targeting our promotions more to customers in Central Canada where our margins are then better and we can afford to take a bit of a hit on remote area shipments.

 

For items under $50, we simply allocated a portion of the total shipping cost for that product based on its ratio to the $50 threshold.  So, a $10 item only has 20% of the shipping cost for the whole product added to our retail price.  That way, if someone buys mutiple items totalling over $50, we have the shipping cost recovered.

 

Given the wide swing in shipping costs, this is the only way we could figure out to do it.  It seems to be working, because our total shipping cost deficit is about 6% of sales, and the amounts we add to products averages about 8%.

[Naldinho]

Unfortunately because I've bypassed the zone system I've hit a wall on how useful my advice is. My product has the issue with a large difference in size -- some orders go into envelopes and others require multiple skids. This is how I've done it and maybe it will be useful to your question.
 

Every customer gets Fedex Ground and Express using live quotes including our discounted rate -- paid module to get around the limitations of the free one packing everything into one box.

Orders with a local postal code get free pick up as an option as well as a cheap local courier service + the Fedex live quotes

US orders get Fedex + USPS

Heavy orders get Fedex + LTL Freight calculated based on postal code.

So far this is working. I need to add US Freight and I had to remove Canada Post but would like to eventually return it as an option using live quotes. 

Adding the LTL Freight took a most of a day and required getting a page worth of quotes from my LTL shipper from which I could build a cost estimating model but so far it has saved us twice from coming in way low on shipping to rural orders that were most of a skid. 

 

Edited July 13, 2016 by Naldinho (see edit history)

[RVPSRichard]

I actually think I have my problem solved and it looks like you have it figured out where it's working for you.  Because we sell RV parts, we offer in store pickup to anyone, regardless of location, because someone from a long way away might be on a trip and want to pick their stuff up here.

 

One thing I would be interested in discussing is how you did the LTL, my calculations aren't perfect.  One challenge I've just discovered is that there are overlength charges for my long awning tubes.  Where are you located?

 

Since you're shipping from a single location, you might look at an API integration with Freightcenter for the LTL shipments.  This would enable you to pull live rates for freight shipments as well.  I tried to get the same sort of infomation you got from our primary freight carrier (Manitoulin), but didn't have much success because we don't ship a lot of stuff truck, probably less than 1%, and I didn' pursue it.  Because of this, it also doesn't make sense for us to spend a lot on an integration with the Freightcenter API.  We'd look at that integration if a module was available, however.

[Naldinho]

We use Manitoulin and it was difficult to get them to provide the information I wanted. I would have preferred an API but the handful of companies I was familiar with are all in the stone ages when it comes to stuff like that. We had used Manitoulin before and their prices are really good so we kept trying and eventually got assigned a sales rep who seemed fairly young and eager. When he said he was going to provide us with rates I thought he meant a complete rate chart but turned out I had to pick locations and I would only get rates for those locations. 

What I ended up doing was pulling freight data from FedEx freight for all the postal codes and then adjusting the FedEx price based on the ratio between Manitoulin and FedEx for the closest location where I had both. This is vastly inferior to having an API but I didn't think any reasonably priced LTL had an API. So far it has turned out to be accurate but the accuracy depends entirely on the assumption that the price ratio between FedEx and Manitoulin remains consistent.

I was dreading doing freight to States as it would be a much bigger project. If there is an API option it would be so much easier but Manitoulin has been really good compared to some of the previous LTL carriers so tough choice.

We're in Ottawa