[ic] Chained Shipping Question

[Mark Bryant]

Hi Everyone,

In the quest to stop orders over 30.00 GBP from being placed without the 
appropriate shipping insurance, I've decided that I need to use a shipping 
method that first looks at the subtotal of a cart AND its weight before 
showing the options to the customer.

I already have 2 shipping methods (STANDARD and NEXTDAY), both based on 
weight, and wondered what's the best way to extend them to include the 
subtotal in the calculation.

The checkout page should offer the shipping methods as per the following 
simple pseudo code:

If subtotal <= 30.00
         show/use uninsured shipping based on cart weight (STANDARD)
         show the insured shipping as an option as it doubles up as a next 
day delivery (NEXTDAY)
If subtotal > 30.00
         show/use insured shipping based on cart weight (NEXTDAY) only
endif

The shipmodes value for the country concerned in the COUNTRY table is 
currently "STANDARD NEXTDAY".

I'm thinking I should alter that to "NEWMETHOD NEXTDAY" and create a new 
"wrapper method" called NEWMETHOD that checks the subtotal before chaining 
to the STANDARD method (if under 30 GBP) to get the final cost based on the 
cart's weight.

I've had a good read of the online docs 
and  http://www.icdevgroup.org/archive/interchange-users/1999/msg05580.html 
where an example of chained shipping is given, but I'm still a bit confused 
about how to properly apply it to my circumstances. However, Mike does 
comment that it's a mostly undocumented feature :(

I think I could just add the first 2 lines below to my shipping.asc and 
make the above country table change to make it all work?

NEWMETHOD       Standard Shipping       [subtotal 
noformat=1]   0       0       e  Nothing in your cart to ship!
NEWMETHOD       Standard Shipping       [subtotal 
noformat=1]   1       30      m  >>STANDARD

STANDARD        Standard Shipping       weight  0       0       e  Nothing 
in your cart to ship!
STANDARD        Standard Shipping       weight  1       100     0.42
STANDARD        Standard Shipping       weight  100     150     0.60
.
<truncated list>
STANDARD        Standard Shipping       weight  2000    9999999 e Your cart 
is too heavy!

Does anyone see any potential problems doing this?

Many thanks

Mark


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