Shipping Modules

It is wise first of all to think about how you will charge for postage and packing. The easiest way is to have a fixed shipping price for all of your products, but this is not always practical – especially if your products vary greatly in size and/or weight.

Not only do you need to think about shipping rates, but also shipping methods. Will you offer more than one shipping method – eg. next day delivery as well as standard? DHL as well as Royal Mail?

Even if you decide to only use one company for all of your shipping, you still need to tell VirtueMart about it. To set up a new ‘shipper’, select ‘Create Shipper’ from the ‘Shipping’ menu. This takes you to shipper editor.

Figure 4.75. VirtueMart Administration: Shipper Form

List order is just a numeric value which is used to sort the shipper names, so enter 1 for the shipper that you want to be listed 1st, 2 for the one you want to be listed 2nd, etc.

When you have added the shipping companies you want to use, you need to configure the shipping rates. You can set up different rates for different service levels (eg. next day, two day, first class etc.) or according to the weight of the shipment. You can also select whether to add VAT to the shipping rate or not. All of this takes place in the Shipping Rate Editor – see next figure.

To edit or delete existing shipping rates, select ‘Shipping Rates’ from the ‘Shipping’ menu.

Figure 4.76. VirtueMart Administration: Shipping Rate List

By clicking on the name of a shipping rate in this list, you can access the shipping rate form to edit this shipping rate. To add a new shipping rate, click the "New" button in the toolbar.

Figure 4.77. VirtueMart Administration: Shipping Rate Form

In this form you can specify the details of the shipping rate.