nopCommerce v2.40 roadmap

buzz wrote:
Late jannuary

My company sells/ships goods from multiple locations. (North America, Europe and Australia) so I am also interested in Multi Store support.

The biggest problem for us now is that we can't use the Shipping Calculator as there is only one "Ship-From" address. If there was a way to select the "Ship-From" address as part of the checkout process that would eliminate a huge problem for us.

I have uploaded a mockup graphic of what we envision the checkout page could look like:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=5d7bd18d324cbeef&resid=5D7BD18D324CBEEF!1425&parid=5D7BD18D324CBEEF!159&authkey=!AD3TU-Gi4LG0eVQ

Have a look and let me know what you think.

I somewhat question the utility of allowing a customer to choose the source of the shipment.  I've never seen that before.  I would think a shipping "system" should be smart enough to calculate that, and also deal with shipping different items on the same order from different locations (when item is not available at a particular warehouse).

I don't [EDIT] know if you really mean "multi store" the way I think many others here do  (you can search for other posts on it).  I suspect what you are looking for is  Dropshipping and multiple warehouse support

Also, another concern regarding multiple shipping sources is that a)  the current shipping service does not set getShippingOptionRequest.ZipPostalCodeFrom, .Country, and b) even if it did most of shipping plugins don't handle it   (only UPS & USPS do).

The Shipping.Director plugin (www.noptools.com) does allow setting of ZipPostalCodeFrom, and Country, and has a programmable rules engine and basic packaging cabability including "by sender", that could handle some multi-warehouse scenarios.

New York wrote:

Hi New York:
Have you had a look to the multi-store built by hezyz. It is more a dropshipping solution required by RolyP, but it does not have the coding to calculate the shipping cost form different warehouses. Maybe your Shipping Director can fill that gap

eadameg wrote:

I've not tried it, but I have been following the post.  Based on comments like

... store managers [plural]

... one store with an option to different vendors to upload and manage their products.

I thought it was more of a 'multi-tenant' type implementation.  
RollyP seems to want a (one store with) multi-warehouse ( "click the closest distribution point").

(Maybe the multi store handles both types?)

New York wrote:
... Orders ar split  among the corresponding store managers so they supply thier part. The shipping cost is calculated as regardless the origin of items; so here is where Shipping Director could do a more precise calculation.

(Maybe the multi store handles both types?) I guess so

not to add to this discussion, but this could likely bbe implemented by code that gets a shipping quote for each of your warehouses, and then shows the customer the cheapest of them... Maybe not something that should be part of the standard project (since it's pretty specialized), but might be a nice addon

In our business model, we charge back the shipping costs to our customer. So calculating an accurate shipping charge at the time of checkout is very important to us and the customer.

For example, if I have warehouse/fulfillment centres in Sydney, Australia and Dublin, Ireland that carry the same goods and I have a customer in Auckland, New Zealand that wants to place an order. The customer has given us the "Ship-To" address, but which "Ship-From" address is used to calculate the shipping charges? Obviously the shipping charges will be significantly different between the 2 locations.

Now I'm not too sure whether the solution is Multi-Store, Multi-Warehouse, using Shipping Director or having a custom solution developed, but I can tell you that this business scenario is a lot more common than you think. While my example used different countries, it could be narrowed down to different states/provinces or even counties. The key here is that the business has 2 different physical locations (either as stores, warehouses or combination of both) and a requirement to calculate shipping costs.

I have not read up on Shipping Director‘s capabilities yet, so that’s my next step. But for our situation, I like Boomhauer's idea of getting a shipping quote for each warehouse and letting the customer pick the cheapest shipping cost.

Now to find someone to develop the solution ;-)
PM me if you know someone.

Rolly

RollyP wrote:

Don't even bother the customer with it, just auto-pick the lowest amount.  Would you have stock of every product at both warehouses or do you have to also build inventory numbers into each product for N warehouses?

@RollyP
I think boomhauer, andy, and I are all saying the same thing - customer should not have to choose - the system should only present the lowest cost.

I built Shipping Director in response to one of my client's needs: a) many unusual shipping scenarios - e.g. various "deals" he made with his customers, the need for Freight shipping for large products, sometimes wanting to use UPS instead of FedEx, etc., and b) he was drop shipping from multiple distributors - i.e. different physical locations.

P.S.  I think you should start a new Post if we want to further this shipping discussion - 2.4 is not going to support multi-store or warehouse.