Drop Shipping and Magento
I totally love magentos store front, everything about it, but I am surprised that you cannot pass to the cart, the origin zip code of your products. You can only config one origin zip code.
This does not allow for very accurate shipping charges to be calculated vs real time. I ship from Washington, Calif, Ohio, Iowa. So somebody gets hit on shipping, mostly the customer may find your shipping charges too high and move on. Do any of you use Magento, and if so how do you deal with this? I have other sites using Cart Manager, which is only a cart- a very good one IMO, but it connects to the ups calcuator and feeds it the origin zip code of each proudct added, and my real life experiece is it comes back with almost dead spot on charges, ie what I have to pay for shipping to my supplier is almost exactly the same as Cart Manager calculates. I have tried real testing with Magento, UPS plug in and its considerably off from the real sales I have made on other sites. Same product weights, same origin zip, same destination zip.
Does anybody else find this a problem? Seems like all the ecomm things I have looked into allow for multiple origin shipping, tie directly to ups or fed ex etc. But they sure are not as cool and complete in alll the other areas as Magento!
Any thoughts, suggestions? I tried suggesting this to the magento team but got nowhere with it.
1Ron Seigel posted Sun, February 17, 2008
The problem I see is that if a customer orders 2 items that are from two different suppliers then your way they’ll be charged significantly more than if both the items came from the same supplier.
IMO that isn’t fair to the customer.
I simply charge a flat rate per order and, if necessary, eat the rest.
Am I missing something here? How exactly does Cart Manager handle this?
2Mark_Kimsal posted Mon, February 18, 2008
Heh, if I understood jack-crap about drop shipping I could write a fix to allow for multiple origin shipping. But, alas, there is only 1 origin address.
Perhaps there are sneaky ways around this limitation. Perhaps you can have 1 shipping origin *per*store*?
Maybe you could make different store views and different catalogs for each drop ship supplier and hard-code some fancy HTML to generate the categories from all the stores combined.
3Ron Seigel posted Sun, February 24, 2008
@Mark
If my understanding is correct, generally you would assign an origin ZIP per product. It gets sticky when a customer orders multiple products from multiple suppliers. IMHO it’s not fair to charge the customer inflated shipping rates due to multiple shipments (especially since the goal is for the drop shipping suppliers to be essentially invisible to the end customer).
It gets even trickier when a given product is available from more than one supplier (although I personally just assign one supplier per product - usually the cheapest but there are other factors involved as well).
I’d be interested in seeing examples of how other carts handle this situation to see if there’s a reasonable solution.
Anyone have some examples we can look at? (preferably open source of course so we can take a peek under the hood).
4nafnaf1000 posted Thu, February 28, 2008
When it comes to a drop shipping system Cnet is King....
I once looked in to using there system buy the charge an arm and a leg…
They do not sell the items all the have done is designed a system that you have put in your user name a password for the vender’s and you are set up for automatic XML feeds and the works. When a order comes in it is just 1 or 2 clicks on the order is places on there website. I would recommend modeling them. I think they do it right.
5eric t posted Tue, April 29, 2008
Anna, I too have been looking for a cart that can complete multiple ship from addresses based on product. I would think that the cart would need to call a service to calculate the ship info for each product and then total up the amount for display. The user shouldn’t know that the products would be shipping from multiple warehouses across the country. They just need to know the total.
I know I am over simplifying things, but it would be nice. Other issues would be that not all things can be shipped via USPS, UPS or DHL. Some have to ship private carrier. But I could mark up the products that have that issue to cover the loss.
This is a great product, however it does need some work to handle drop shippers.
Keep up the great work Magento Folks.