[ic] Blank Shipping Pulldown on checkout.html

[interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Underwood [mailto:scottu@aztech-cs.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 11:12 AM
> To: interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
> Subject: Re: [ic] Blank Shipping Pulldown on checkout.html
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, rdilks wrote:
> 
> > Hi All
> > 
> > I know that this has come up numerous times before but I 
> have searched 
> > the Archives and there seems to be no explanation for why 
> the shipping 
> > selection pulldown is coming up blank on the checkout page of my 
> > installation.
> > When I try to change the country to another shipping zone it always 
> > reloads and jumps back to the first one in the list suggesting the 
> > search has failed.
> > I have all of the correct Perl modules installed and have used the 
> > latest IC 4.8.3 running on Redhat 7.2.
> > The shipping modes has been reduced to one entry with a simple 
> > calculation by weight and the shipmodes in country.txt are set 
> > correctly.
> > Has anyone ever managed to get to the bottom of this problem ?
> > If so please please enlighten me before my MD cans the project !!
> > 
> > Cheers
> > 
> > Russ
> > 
> Russ,
> 	I've been playing with this for a little now and may have some 
> input. As Jason suggested, if your shipping by weight make 
> sure the weight 
> of the product is > 0. 
> 
> The drop down list will not populate if it does not know 
> where to ship. 
> If you don't have that information filled in the dropdown doesn't get 
> populated. At least this is my experience with out of the box 
> functionality. I also reduced my shipping options to one 
> inside the US (UPS Ground) and 
> that gave me problems with the Hawaii and Alaska, watch for that.
> 
> When you change the country drop down list it will refresh 
> the checkout 
> page, this is normal, but if you don't have any shipping 
> designated for 
> that country then the shipping box will not be populated.

I also found that with the UPS lookup, not having the destination
zip code populated can cause an error message and the drop down
is not populated.  When the user first comes into the page, they
haven't entered their zip code, so the UPS lookup doesn't know
where they are shipping to.  I added a button "Update Shipping
Options" to address this as a prototype, but the client actually
wanted shipping by price implemented first, so I took it out.
You could also have a multi-page checkout process, where the
shipping address is selected on one page and the shipping options
on the next page.  Lastly you could also have the form be
submitted - in its incomplete state - when the user leaves the
zip/postal code entry box using Javascript (obviously less than
ideal for those who turn off Javascript or use browsers which
don't use it).  This would be the same as the button mentioned
above (and is what happens when you change the country).

Good luck.
Patrick