Shipping Methods by Product

I have a client who sells and ships live marine foods. Some of these need to be sent via over night shipping to ensure live delivery.

I do not know if there is an extension that exists for this purpose, but if not I will need to build it. I was looking at the shipping director extension, but it doesn't look like you can limit shipping choices by product.

Can anyone get me pointed in the right direction?

Using Shipping Director, you can absolutely limit shipping choices based on product, or category, or specification attribute, or customer location, or if other items are in the shopping cart, etc...etc...etc..

Usually the easiest way to do what you need to do is to create a new category, not published, and put all items which MUST be shipped overnight in this hidden category. Then you can set shipping director to not allow particular shipping options if any product in the order is in that hidden special category.

You just have to define all the possible rules into expressions....the support at nopTools will help get you started if you ask him.

nopCommerce does not directly support having multiple shipping methods for an order (i.e. per item), because the Order only stores one shipping system/method (selected by customer).  Shipping Director can work around it in a couple of ways:

1)  ErrorExit  - can detect the multiple items in the cart, and then put up a message which also prevent the checkout from continuing. (For example, you could tell the customer to manually create two separate orders.)

2)  normalize shipping methods names from different shipping providers to create a single combined method/rate.  See this post.

Using the techniques described in 2 above would also allow you offer an option like  "Ground (with overnight marine foods)".   The difficulty of the configuration would depend on which (and how many) carriers/methods you offer.