Overview
When an order is shippable, Squirrelcart will attempt to offer your customers rates at checkout, based on your settings. An order is considered shippable when at least one shipping courier is enabled, and at least one product in the cart is flagged as Shippable on it's product record in the control panel.
How Rates are Displayed During Checkout
During the checkout process, if an order is shippable there are two ways in which rates are displayed to the customer.
Method 1: Checkout Shipping Rate Page
When the customer starts the checkout process, they will be asked to enter their address information. After they have submitted that info, they are taken to the shipping rate page.
Rates and services are grouped by courier and are displayed in ascending order with the lowest price first.
Method 2: Shipping Estimator
The shipping estimator works just like the shipping rate page but allows the customer to see and choose rates prior to entering their full address information. It appears as a tool at the bottom of the first step of the checkout process (the "View Cart" Page). See the Shipping Estimator topic in this section for detailed information.
Default Rate
If only one rate is available, Squirrelcart will inform the customer that shipping has defaulted to that rate/service.
Shipping rates can be specified by you as a fixed amount, or obtained behind the scenes during checkout via a live rate lookup using several shipping courier APIs (real time rates).
Real Time Rates
This is the preferred, most accurate, and least complicated way to handle your shipping rates. To use this feature you must enable it for each courier you would like to use. See the Real Time Rates topic in this section for more information.
How to Configure Rates for Your Products
Each product record has its own shipping settings. They can be used to control rates in various ways. See the Product Rate Configuration topic for detailed information.
Controlling Rate Failure
In the event that an order is shippable but no rates are available for that order (due to invalid address information, misconfiguration, etc...), Squirrelcart will inform the customer that rates were not able to be determined.
You can control what happens when a failure occurs, and can modify the message shown during rate failure.
How to Change Rate Failure Settings
- Open the Store Settings page in the control panel
- Locate the Shipping Rate Failure fieldset:
- Use the When a failure occurs field to change what happens during rate failure. Options include:
- complete order normally
This option completes the order normally, and does not show an alert on the shipping step during checkout.
Note that if rate failure occurs while using the shipping estimator on the "view cart" page, the alert will still appear within the estimator.
- complete order, with alert
This option completes the order normally, and shows an alert.
- prevent order completion
This option prevents the order from being placed, and shows an alert. - Use the Alert Message field to control the alert shown to the customer.
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