More Complex (i.e. real world) Shipping Calculations

["Thompson-Jordan" <Thompson-Jordan@mindspring.com>]

I need shipping calculations that:

- Divides the order into boxes and does individual UPS shipping
calculations for each box, as this is how UPS charges.
- Be able to associate a "ship from" ZIP code with items and do a UPS
lookup based on where the box is shipped from.

I think these must be fairly common shipping needs, because not all
shipping is "one box from my location." I don't believe that Minivend can
do this currently, if I am wrong please let me know.

My initial thought was to do this manually. I would add "shippedfrom" and
"boxsize" fields to the Products database. The "shippedfrom" field would
contain the UPS table from which to lookup the shipping. The "boxsize"
field that would contain the percentage of a box the item needs (e.g. 0.5
for half, 0.25 for a quarter). If these fields were empty or not present
it would assume one box from the default location.

On the Checkout page, as I looped through [item-list], I would

1. Divide items into lists using the "shippedfrom" field,
2. Further divide these lists into boxes by adding up the "boxsizes"
3. Calculate the weight for each box
3. Do an individual shipping calculation for each box based on its "from"
and "to" ZIP codes
4. Sum the cost to ship each box into the shipping total.

Questions:

- Can Minivend do this within its current shipping model?

- Has anyone implemented this, and if so, would you make the code
available?

- If this hasn't been done, and others are interested in it as well, could
a group of us come up with some UserTags to do these type of shipping
calculations and make them available to all?

If this hasn't been done I will probably plow ahead and would appreciate
help from any Perl monkeys in the crowd.

Christopher Thompson