For example, it is not legal to ship live plants to California.  If you try to place an order in www.tastefulgarden.com with a CA address, including live plants, an error message will prevent that from proceeding.  This work involved setting a flag that identifies the live plant produts, then alterations to the checkout.

 

E-mail me directly if you need this built into your site.

 

The site is Cindy's www.tastefulgarden.com and she is prohibited from sending live plants to California.  We added a flag to the category record (and the admin) where she may indicate that certain categories contain only live plants.  That could just as easily have been a flag at the product level - but for her requirement this represented less data entry.  At checkout, if such items are present on the order, we simply stop them when they get to the ship-to address block in onepagecheckout.asp.

 

Changing this "we can't ship this to you" functionality to observe some other business rules would not at all be a stretch.

Today we launched a v4 store (actually, this was a major upgrade of a v3.11 store) in which many custom mods were migrated or introduced.  Among them is a new tool that we will consider refining and expanding if there is sufficient demand.

 

Over time we have seen requests for a means by which one could exclude free shipping if the ship-to address is AK or HI, exclude Fedex Ground when ship-to is Canada, and in this case our client needed the ability to exclude certain shipping methods when the order contained a particular product class (live plants).

 

Combining our historical perspective of past requests along with the immediate requirement, we created a tool that allows the merchant to define (on a state or country basis) the shipping methods that will be excluded from such specified orders.  We believe that this tool will have general interest among PC merchants.

 

The result looks like this:

 

Before we spend time expanding this tool's functionality, we would like to measure interest in this module by receiving your comments about how (within your enterprise) you might be able to use such a tool - and what changes you might like to see. 

 

Of course, if you wish to e-mail us directly with your comments and let us know of your intent to order the tool - such will be even greater motivation for our continued efforts.

 

Release date is not entirely certain at the moment as I'd like to see the tool used in production for a few weeks, along with gathering input as to other features that might be desired. But we'd certainly like to get it released in the next month or so, largely depending upon response to this post.

 

Looking forward to comments.