Windows Server

tbone · Guest

Here's the problem. Our company has a print catalog campaign where once a
month they wish to offer an item to have free shipping. This is only for the
item in question and does not include other items in the order.

The company that did the intial developement of our site has indicated that
it would be unlikely to be able to offer such a discount in Commerce Server.

Unfortunately, unlike these developers I will not have the luxury of telling
my company no, we can't offer this.

I guessing there will be no easy answer for this but if anyone can direct me
to a link, book etc. on where I would start in researching this.

Pipelines seem to be the bottleneck to handle this problem.
It's clear to me that this is not the first project that someone
unexperienced in C++ would want to tackle since the company that did this
site for us, with developers who possesed much higher level of development
experiece, jumped through all kinds of hops to avoid dealing with pipelines
to address price breaks based on quantity.

The book "Building Solutions with Microsoft Commerce Server 2002" mentions
third party developers for custom pipelines. Yet finding these kind of third
party developers appears to be elusive at best. Are any available?

Ravi Shankar · Guest

In Commerce Server, the shipping is calculated based on the Order Totals or
Weight. If your company is using the weight mechanism then for the duration
required you could publish the SKU mentioned with a 0 weight. That would
effectively cause the shipping component from excluding it during the
shipping charges calculation :)

Order Total might be more tricky cause it would require the SKU line amount
to somehow not figure in the order subtotal..

Regards.

"tbone" wrote:

Zoe Hart [MVP] · Guest

We do something like this routinely as many of our Commerce Server customers
have products that they don't want to figure into shipping costs. For
example, when calculating shipping by order total, we typically exclude gift
certificates since it doesn't cost any more to ship a $1000 gift certificate
than a $1 gift certificate.

We're able to do this because we typically use a custom pipeline component
for shipping calculations. We have a FreightExempt property in our product
catalog. Our custom shipping component calculates the order total excluding
the cost of all FreightExempt items and then loops through the shipping rate
data to determine the shipping cost based on that reduced total.

You can pretty easily develop a custom pipeline component using the built-in
scriptor component. It's all done in VB Script which on the one hand is
easy, but on the other is frustrating if you've grown accustomed to
programming in C#. There's also the option of developing your custom
component in C# as a true pipeline component.

We do plenty of custom pipeline work. Some developers hate it, some are good
at it. I can't say that any of us really like it, but it shouldn't be a
bottleneck to accomplishing what you want to do.

Zoe

"tbone" <tbone@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
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SusanH · Guest

We have certain products, such as membership subscriptions and gift cards,
that we want never to "count" towards shipping.

We use UPS as a shipper, and we have chosen not to use the built in shipping
methods, but rather to create custom shipping methods. That way we can do
things like "Preview Shipping" which estimates shipping costs and "Time in
Transit".

Anyway, when we came up with the requirements for excluding shipping, we
just put that in our custom shipping pipeline. We cycle through the
shipment's line items and don't add the weight to the total order weight if
that shipment's dictionary object has a certain property (i.e.
shipment["DontAddShipping"] == "true").

Also, this allows us to determine, if the total cost of the items in the
shipment is over a certain threshold amount, we don't charge shipping at all.

Don't know if that's feasable for you, but it seems to work well for us. The
setup for creating and "registering" the shipping method isn't too bad if you
know what to look for. If you are interested in this I can post specifics.

Tbone · Guest

Thanks for the input. I've put something together based on Ravi's suggestion.

Our CS cart bypasses some of the pipelines. I'm pretty sure I'm not ready to
start interacting with pipelines at this point anyway. The implementation is
somewhat clunking at this time since zero weight is displayed for the item
and I've had to force the item from consideration for UPS shipping to avoid
some default frieght costs.

I'm still working on this for better all around implementation but I had to
get a working version up fast.

I'll surely give this suggestion a workout since that might allow me to
handle this better.

"SusanH" wrote:

cgruber · Guest

Hello
SusanH, if you still are out there, the company I am at is trying t
implement custom shipping using UPS's rate checking just like you hav
done. Could you post some of those specifics

Thanks
Chri

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