Customer to ship product back for maintenance purposes

We want to provide a service where the customer can send a product back for maintenance.  The workflow would be something like this:

1. When purchasing this service, customer will provide a shipping address.
2. This is the step where we need help!  We will provide customer with a shipping label so they can ship the product to us.  Shipping label should be a pdf so that we can email it and also let the customer download it.
3. Customer ships product to us.
4. We perform maintenance and send it back.

Step #2 is where we need help.  Is there a plugin we can use to generate a shipping label?  We are located in the USA and will be providing this service within the USA. Most plugins I see are for delivering product to the customer; we need the product to come to us.

We are using nopCommerce 4.20.

Hello,

I'm not sure that I've came upon a plugin with which you can achieve all of that, but for the attachment of a pdf file, you can take a look at our Nop Attachments plugin. With it you are able to attach files to different products based on a variety of conditions, you can group your attachments in categories, add the file to Order Placed or Order Complete emails and so on.

I hope that this information will be of help,
Nikola.

mikehiga wrote:

You should expand on that.  Is there a specific carrier involved?  See https://www.ups.com/us/en/help-center/package-problem/return.page

We are hoping to use UPS, FEDEX and USPS.

When the customer purchases our service, they will essentially buy a "service" product.  During checkout, they provide an address.  The price would be fixed depending on how many products they need serviced. $x/unit if sending 1-5, $y/unit 6-10 and $z/unit if sending > 10.

Once the order is placed, we would either use a plugin that will generate a shipping label for the customer.  The label would be sent to customer via email and also be available for download.  The email part is a nice-to-have but the download part is a must-have.  (I figure if we can provide a PDF for download, it shouldn't be too difficult to email it too.)

The label wouldn't have to be generated in real-time; although it would be desirable it this was an automated process.

RE: "... use UPS, FEDEX and USPS..."

Each carrier has their own shipping API that can return a label.  Thus, each would require separate development effort.

And then, how would the system know which to use, or do you want the customer to choose?

Sorry - that should have been "or".  We would choose the one from those carriers that works for best for us.

Each of these carriers already have a plugin.  I haven't implemented any of these for the normal selling of products because we have a separate process for shipping.

I was hoping that one of these plugins could do what we want because I want to automate the process for getting the shipping label to the customer.  If we cannot automate this, we will just have to create the labels outside of nopCommerce and then load it to where customer can download it.  Not exactly automatic, but it's a solution we can work with.