Various Shipping Questions

For individual products:

Is there a way to offer free ground shipping, but charge for next day/2nd day?
Can we ask the customer to pay shipping on a free item?
If a registered user is placing an order, will there be a screen that shows their default shipping address and allows them to add a new shipping address if desired?

1st let me say that there are no shipping modifiers at product level.
The only thing you can do at product level (but may be a very tricky way of doing things) is to set fake weights to match some custom values in shipping's CSV files. Weight is the only product param that's considered by the shipping module, but again I'd really not even think at using such approach.
Also, in a cart there may be multiple products too, so product-level shipping rules would be very hard to implemet because they would require a high number of exceptions in case of "multiple rules" needed (just think at a product that allows free shipping in the same cart with another one that doesn't)

So, my other replies are about the general shipping module (so, applied to all your products)

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Is there a way to offer free ground shipping, but charge for next day/2nd day?

Yup! If you use any of the live shipping modules (UPS or Fedex) you need to remove Ground from their options.
And for ground itself you can add a custom entry by using CSV files. More details here.

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Can we ask the customer to pay shipping on a free item?

Shipping is normally related to online payment. So, it is not asked to customer in case the order is a quote order.
Unfortunately, if cart value is zero, the order is forced to be quote as there's nothing to pay... which means shipping wouldn't even be shown.
I guess the best approach here would be to accept them as quote orders, and then mail the confirmation to customer by asking him to pay the shipping value (it's normally easy to include in a mail a direct link to pay a specific amount with gateways like PayPal)

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If a registered user is placing an order, will there be a screen that shows their default shipping address and allows them to add a new shipping address if desired?

Not really, but let me explain how it works:
if a registered user is placing his 1st order, all fields will obviously be blank.
If he's a returning customer, fields will be prefilled with the same data used for his last order.
So, there's really no "default shipping address" saved in RTD. Last one will be used to prefill fields, and customer will be free to edit them if needed

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Can we ask the customer to pay shipping on a free item?

Shipping is normally related to online payment. So, it is not asked to customer in case the order is a quote order.
Unfortunately, if cart value is zero, the order is forced to be quote as there's nothing to pay... which means shipping wouldn't even be shown.
I guess the best approach here would be to accept them as quote orders, and then mail the confirmation to customer by asking him to pay the shipping value (it's normally easy to include in a mail a direct link to pay a specific amount with gateways like PayPal)

How about if we make the product free with a coupon code?



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If a registered user is placing an order, will there be a screen that shows their default shipping address and allows them to add a new shipping address if desired?

Not really, but let me explain how it works:
if a registered user is placing his 1st order, all fields will obviously be blank.
If he's a returning customer, fields will be prefilled with the same data used for his last order.
So, there's really no "default shipping address" saved in RTD. Last one will be used to prefill fields, and customer will be free to edit them if needed
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Well, in our case, we'd be creating the registered users ourselves based on a database that we have. If any of the addresses are not up to date, which will inevitably happen, it would be nice for the customer to be able to see the address during the checkout process.

Coupon code would make no difference: RTD determines is there's a price at the end of all pricing processes.
So, if for any reason the final price is zero, it will be a quote order.
Eventually, you may want to charge users something like 1 cent, just to trick the math.


Stored shipping address:
they will be able to change it. But as the value used to prefill the form is from their last order, there's no way in RTD to push a shipping address for a user unless he placed at least one order.
To say it simple, you'll not be able to set a shipping address for your users unless you're also placing the entire order on their behalf