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?

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.

@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).

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.

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.

OScommerce had a solution that worked pretty good.  Basically you would enter the ship from location in the Manufacturer details so when you assign the manufacturer to the product it will know where it’s shipping from.  The trickiest part is the shipping costs, and at that point maybe you just charge a flat fee maybe a variable one that changes with the amount of different locations.