Bunch of shipping questions

1. In our shipping options we've added a $3.00 modifier for all shipments to cover handling. This is experimental at the moment and subject to change. We have "preferred" customers with specific products, for their use only, that we do not want to charge this $3.00 handling charge. Is there a way to customize this on a per product basis? The only way I can figure to do this is lower the product price by $3.00. If I do that, then future changes to the shipping modifier will mean we have to go back and change all the "preferred" customer prices. How would you suggest this be done?

2. You've mentioned before that you are working on a shipping tutorial. How's that coming?

3. I am also interested in knowing more about the Affiliates feature you have planned, as it may help with this issue. Any word on that?

4. Also could there be the possibility of a customer creating say 5 different designs and specifying 5 different shipping addresses within one order? We have Affiliates who would like to enter orders this way instead of having to go through the entire pay process one at a time. The solution at the moment seems to be through the user notes area we've set up, though not a very elegant solution as the email export template can't use the data to pass off to our database solution. Also there is the danger of mismatching design with correct shipping.

5. Our other problem is dealing with Customer Pickup and shipping. We use RTD for a lot of local customer pickup work. We cannot find a solution to allow our customers to pay online for their order and have shipping not charged for customer pickup. You have a suggestion for this?

There seems to be quite the powerful possibilities if these features are achieved. Hope this is clear to you. Let me know if you need better examples.

Thanks

We are now looking at various shipping routines that already exist - paypal has one within its site. We'd like to someday have writeups on how to interface with some of the major ones. We have tons of upgrades in progress, so our time is a bit strapped to take any of these requests on just yet.

While we support basic shipping functionality, we expect that major shipping operations will be handled by an external system - ie commercial cart software or in-house programming. However, I haven't encountered any existing systems that will allow 5 shipping addresses within one order.

Our affiliate system is fully working - basically you set up your store and pass any/all products to affiliates and they create a RTD site with their logo, etc to display the items. It is a bit cumbersome to maintain but may be worth investigating if these are fairly regular customers that have special pricing/product options available to them. Perhaps just one affiliate site with the pricing common to all these special customers will do. Another idea if you venture into an external cart system such as Volusion (expensive commercial cart) or osCommerce (inexpensive open source code) is the use of discount or coupon codes.

Admin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> We are now looking at various shipping routines
> that already exist - paypal has one within its
> site.
>

I was thinking about that in looking for the solutions. Can we already use the Paypal shipping routines instead of the RTD one?

> While we support basic shipping functionality, we
> expect that major shipping operations will be
> handled by an external system - ie commercial cart
> software or in-house programming.

Yes, that is what we want to do, but would need more tutorial on how the interfacing works.

>However, I
> haven't encountered any existing systems that will
> allow 5 shipping addresses within one order.
>

I know, but it would be a nice feature.

> Our affiliate system is fully working - basically
> you set up your store and pass any/all products to
> affiliates and they create a RTD site with their
> logo, etc to display the items. It is a bit
> cumbersome to maintain but may be worth
> investigating if these are fairly regular
> customers that have special pricing/product
> options available to them. Perhaps just one
> affiliate site with the pricing common to all
> these special customers will do. Another idea if
> you venture into an external cart system such as
> Volusion (expensive commercial cart) or osCommerce
> (inexpensive open source code) is the use of
> discount or coupon codes.

Will look into this a bit more.

Thanks for your help.

For PayPal Shipping - log in to your paypal account - click on "Profile" - in the 3rd column you will see Shipping and Sales Tax calculations. If you set these values to ZERO in RTD, you can use Paypal routines for these charges.

As far as tutorials for Exporting our data and Interfacing with other systems - we can only offer half of that at this point. We can export our data in most any format imaginable, but your external system will need to have detailed info on how to pass or import data into it. We have not yet tried to tackle all the possible systems or scenarios that our users will need, but several of with proprietary cart and database applications have been able to adapt our output to there systems (using their in-house programmers). There are tons of stand-alone carts and payment gateways - we'd like to be proficient with the major ones, but that will take time. If you have a specification for a particular data format you would like to see our data in, please pass it on.

Mark :-)

Can you explain this a little more. I'm sorry, I don't understand where you are referring to in RTD.

If you set these values to ZERO in RTD, you can use Paypal routines for these charges.

In the ADMIN PANEL - under ONLINE PAYMENT OPTIONS are links for SALES TAX and SHIPPING.

For Sales Tax - if you have no zones defined and no percentages defined, there will be no sales tax calculated by RTD.

For Shipping - again, if you have no zones or weight tables loaded, there will be no shipping calculated.

If you are still having trouble, please email us with what you are trying to do along with your site name. As I mentioned earlier, we are considering major changes to the shipping and sales tax modules so tutorials for them are on hold.

Mark :-)

Thanks, that make it clearer. Major changes to the shipping and sales tax would be a welcomed.

So with no zones or weight tables loaded RTD passes off the total weight we've defined in our products to Paypal so Paypal can calculate shipping?

We have not yet gone through the paypal site to see if / how to pass weight to it. But in the RTD, we do calculate the total weight so any shipping module which uses weight should work. If you have time yourself to get into paypal and study what is needed be sure to share it with other users. If you find that you need RTD data in another format please let us know.

When we decide a permanent direction for shipping/taxes we will develop more thorough documentation - for now - we can only offer the basic functions we have.

We're committed to a few other upgrades right now that once you see them we're sure you'll agree it was time well spent. Hopefully we will be able to announce them very soon.

Thanks
Mark

Admin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Our affiliate system is fully working - basically
> you set up your store and pass any/all products to
> affiliates and they create a RTD site with their
> logo, etc to display the items. It is a bit
> cumbersome to maintain but may be worth
> investigating if these are fairly regular
> customers that have special pricing/product
> options available to them. Perhaps just one
> affiliate site with the pricing common to all
> these special customers will do. Another idea if
> you venture into an external cart system such as
> Volusion (expensive commercial cart) or osCommerce
> (inexpensive open source code) is the use of
> discount or coupon codes.

I'm revisiting this post for additional information:

I don't understand the part quoted above "pass any/all products to affiliates and they create a RTD site with their logo, etc to display the items."

Does that mean they would open an account with RTD and go through the setup? For our purposes, I don't want that. I want to create what the affiliate works with and keep everything about my company invisible to the clients users.

Here's what I'd like to do:

Create one generic branded RTD affiliate that I can use across the board for all affiliates I work with. Let's call it "The Special Order Fulfillment Company". I think we could use direct link templates without any catalog and have the payments worked out possibly using quotes to the affiliate so that the users would not know where the order was directed. Each product in the site would have a part number which identified that product to a specific affiliate. In this way the affiliates client does all the work and the affiliates source identity is protected while getting the product produced and shipped with little involvement.

Would I be able to do this scenario using my current RTD account or would that require an entirely new setup? Would this work?

Thanks.

First of all, let me say that we're currently revising the affiliate system completely (as of now, the actual version is not used on our machines by anyone).

Naturally, as i'll be shortly on that, every input is welcome. So let me explain at a glance what the system will do as planned, so we can discuss about eventual addons directly here.

It's not really an affiliation system: from RTD point of view, that will be known as "product sharing".
The basic concept is this: suppose you are company A, with all of your products.

The affiliate, which for us will be known as a reseller, will own another RTD company, let's call it comapny B.
What we will allow you to do is to "share" A products with B.
Company B will not have much control over the product definitions: sizes, BGimages, generator configuration... all will be taken directly from A's setup.
Company B will still have the ability of changing something, if A will allow him to do it: this includes some reseller's things as, for example, the price to be shown to end users.

Supposing B will be a reseller only, all the setups he will need to do will be related to look and company info: let's simply say he will offer your products with his own layout, so that end customers will never know the "real printing company" is A.

About how to manage all of this, i think we will give two main ways:
1) allow B to work independently, and he will need to call A when an order is to be printed for real;
In this case, B will be billed for his orders just like they were made over own products: B and A will deal out of RTD for order finalization (in simpler terms, B will most likely provide A files ready to be printed, just as a manufacturer)

2) Give A the ability to see what B sold and the ability to see orders and creating hires of them.
In this case, B will be completely subjected to A, and you may see him just as a reseller of A's products.
The concept is the same, the only difference is that A will also have the ability to finalize orders by itself.

This is all, at a glance. There will be many small things realted to this.
But i hope at least the concept structure is clean to you.

Now: all of this will be done keeping in mind one project we have, which is the ability of creating a resellers network for RTD users, if they want. Anyhow, i think the same concept can be used also to match your own goals: words are nothing, the important thing is that the final result is the expected one.
As i will start this very soon (hopefully), if you or anyone else reading this have any hint, question, suggestion, etc... it will be more than welcomed.

Let me know, and thanks in advance!

I was wondering what the status is with the affiliate program

It is functioning but we are not happy with it and looking to simplify it for both you and your affiliates. Our suggestion... continue building your site to the point you are happy with it. If by then we don't have a new solution we can set you on your way using the current solution. Stay in touch.

Mark

Hey everyone. I had a question about separate shipping options for individual stores. Say we have a store that we set up as a local vendor so we would just have an "in-store pickup" option that would be free and another option for shipping around the area for people who don't want to come in and pick their order up. Then, we have another store that would serve as more of a national vendor. Here, we would have our general shipping option(s). Is there a way to turn the options on/off for each individual store because, for now, I have it where all the options are available to everyone in both stores. Please let me know if this is possible and, if so, how I can go about doing this.

Thank you!

Unfortunately, for now, you can't.
There's nothing to turn shipping options on/off based on store.

Only way to do this at this stage would be to do shipping calculations outside the RTD

Oh, ok. There's not a way we can create a specific .csv file specifying which stores have which shipping options? You mean to use a totally separate external shopping cart if we want to do this?

Acutally yes, that's what I mean.
It can be added in future, but for the time being we have really nothing that would allow you to use different options/CSV files based on the origin store.

Could be coded of course, but would need to be a project as for now it would really be at the end of the priority list (I think you're the first one asking for this feature). In any case, it could take a couple weeks to be completed because of the other existing tasks.
Otherwise, as you said, using an external shopping cart would be the only way.

So, really depends on how important this is for you, and which eventual deadline you have.

my question is along these same lines.

we have several websites. one is discounted and is for shipping only. How can I turn off the local pick up for 4signs.com without turning it off for customsigncenter.com?
is that possible?

thanks!

Sorry, but same answer as above.
For internal RTD shipping calc, there's no filter based off of origin store. So the answer is no.